Will resume soon

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been writing an accountancy application and it's been a bit difficult to concentrate on anything else.

I needed an accountancy application that had an open API, so some other process or application could say to it "I need an invoice, please" and one would be generated, with the correct ledger entries being made. For example, a system managing hosting accounts has a process that measures disk space and bandwidth use for a period of time, calculates the amount and then sends a message to the accounts package. Or some consultancy is performed and the invoice needs to be raised. Or some physical goods are supplied. Regardless of the reason for the invoicing, any independent system can call on the accounts system to generate the invoice and make the book entries.

I was surprised that I couldn't find an adequate package out there, but I couldn't.

But then, if you've made the ledger entries for a supply, you need to be able to record a receipt of a payment. Purchasing is basically the same process with different ledger accounts being written to. Then some kind of interface for managing nominal accounts, customer and suppliers, and key accounts was needed. And so on.

Nearly finished now. I'm quite pleased with it. Documents like orders and invoices are generated as pdfs and emailed to the correct company automatically, there's the necessary client side logic in place to make sure things like receipts are fully allocated, and server side to make sure, for example, that only sets of entries that balance are processed.

Having taken it this far, it might be worth polishing a bit and releasing as an application. But that's for later. For now I need to get it finished and then start blogging again - with a couple of video blogs in the pipeline for a change, and maybe a little bit of news to break - though not remotely on the same level as this past week has seen from Guido.