On 5/16/2022 4:48 PM, Jim DeLaHunt wrote:
Hello, GnuCash users?
I use a service called Freshbooks [1] to track the time I spend
working in my sole proprietorship business, and to generate invoices
to clients billing that time, and to accept payments. In the meantime
I do my bookkeeping in GnuCash. Are there other GnuCash users who also
use Freshbooks?
This is a GENERAL issue, feeds between components of a full business
"system". Which components make up such a system of course depend on the
sort of business, which is why there are commercial "business systems"
specialized by types of business (the needs are VERY different).
Thus we are seeing lots of "complaints" about gnucash not doing this or
that. If you think of full business system, gnucash would be the
accounting component, what where I worked would be called "general
ledger". All business systems would have THAT component but might or
might not have:
(just some examples)
Inventory and Point of Sales (business buys and sells products) ---
note that THESE might be doing things like sales tax)
Billable hours (business "sells" professional service --- usually not
just tracking.invoicing customers but often also employees if their
compensation depends on this)
Payroll and HR -- employee data
Customer database and/or Supplier database
........
These components would communicate to each other, send "feeds" of
"transactions" to each other, either one at a time as happens or batched
(where I worked, batched). Note that where I worked was a VERY big
business, all this system design.implementation was "in house". More
normally, with small up to pretty large businesses the "business system"
would be bought form/maintained by a vendor specializing in this.
One of the BIG decisions when putting pieces together is where are the
best places for the division of labor. So I will ask Jim, have you
carefully considered that "right place" because this can have a huge
affect on the amount of "duplicate work". I don't know more about
FreshBooks besides it being able to do hours invoicing and accounting
but you want the main accounting to be in gnucash. But in deciding the
dividing point, maybe you want more of the accounting in FreshBooks and
less in gnucash. In other words, move SUMMARY data from FreshBooks to
gnucash, not each transaction. Jim, in the old days one of the
simplifications of bookkeeping was "cashbook accounting" where the
majority of transactions were entered directly into a journal-less
mini-ledger and then once every so often (daily, weekly, quarterly,
etc.) a normal transaction transferring the TOTALS (of this mini
-ledger) to the main books. Meanwhile any transactions that didn't
qualify for the "cashbook" were entered normally into the main books. So
if in the period, the number of transactions entered into the cashbook
was C and the number entered directly into the main books was M, the
number of transactions entered into the main books would be M+1 instead
of M+C << when this method was used, it was because C was ten times to a
hundred times larger than M >>
Could something like this help your work flow?
Michael D Novack
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