hillelcoren
commented
8 years ago Maybe...
Thank you for your well written issue, we've looked into this in the past and decided not to move the app in this direction.
- This is a large undertaking and will add a fair amount of complexity to the codebase
- Our target market are freelancers/solopreneurs, most aren't familiar with double-entry accounting
While this may be extremely useful/required by larger businesses the vast majority of our user base won't use it.
It's possible we'd accept a pull request, if you want to make sure it's merged we'd need to agree on the implementation details ahead of time.
pabloalbrecht
BloodyIron
chrisdicarlo
ssnetwrks
bluethumb
BrunoPansani
xeruf
hunterwebsiteservices
paulyili
turbo124
Chart of Accounts
We've been testing invoice ninja for a while and it's great for day-to-day non-accounting use, e.g. employees can easily submit their expense reports, back-office employees can easily create invoices for clients they manage etc.
However, the lack of Accounts means it is currently not possible to use Invoice Ninja as a full-stack accounting software. Most business don't have just "debits and credits" but want to allocate them to accounts (e.g. 'asset', 'liability', 'revenue', 'equity', 'expense', 'cost of goods sold' etc).
Real-Life Examples
This is required to generate a balance sheet that has more than just 'cash on bank account'. For example, if you spend 10,000 $ in writing a technology, your company may not have lost 10,000$, because it now has a technology worth 10,000$, it just lost 10k$ of cash but the net asset of the company shouldn't necessarily change.
When you spend 50,000$ to buy computers, most countries won't let you deduct 50k$ as a 'one-off expense', rather they will account for a 10,000$ expense every year for 5 year; because same as with the technology, the first day you receive your computers, you may have spend 50k$ but you have a tangible, physical asset worth 50k$.
Managing accounts is crucial in accounting and allows a high degree of transparency and reporting when using properly. For instance, let's say that you run Invoice Ninja as a business. You could create a 'revenue' account for each account type, your 'revenue' accounts could look like this:
Revenue:
When you create an invoice and get paid, you allocate that invoice/payment to an account (for example 101). At the end of the year, your balance sheet can be generated very easily and you can easily see how much money Ninja Pro accounts generated.
If you run advertising campaigns, you can easily allocate the bills to a 'cost of goods' account, this allows you to very easily see how much money you actually make after marketing cost (gross revenue minus cost of goods), then how much money you make after all expenses (net profit).
About Chart of Accounts on NetMBA
Features
Conclusion
It may seem like a lot of work but when you break it down to features list it's actually really not that much and the upside of having a working general ledger is HUGE.
I believe this can bring much more than most issues / UI work / fine-tuning that are currently open and I would gladly try to work on this over Christmas if it's not done by then.