Scope of this phase of npoacct

[Daniel Pocock]

On 31 August 2016 03:51:53 CEST, "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn at ebb.org> wrote:
>Glen,
>
>These are useful comments, and I do see your point about how A/P data
>entry is roughly a special-case of what we're trying to do with the
>reimbursement system.
>
>Glen Whitney wrote at 13:22 (PDT) on Friday:
>> I don't see anything much particularly "extra" about reimbursement
>> requests as opposed to other A/P entries on the one hand, or anything
>> much needed for general A/P entries that is irrelevant to
>> reimbursement requests.
>
>The main issue that makes the reimbursement situation more difficult is
>external interaction with someone who knows nothing about how to enter
>things for A/P.  And, there is a judgment call of whether  the expense
>is valid, whether it met the policy, etc.
>
>I've not seen any A/P data entry systems that have a workflow of the
>type Brett is working on, mainly because by the time someone gets in
>front of an A/P entry screen, they *know* they want to enter the
>expense
>and believe it's valid.
>

What you are saying is that for your requirements the existing systems are incomplete, not that they are incompatible.

It is very likely that you will need to write some custom code to implement the workflow you want.  However, once your workflow reaches the point where an expense is fully validated, would you be satisfied to push it into an existing A/P solution or do you want to code an alternative to A/P and then create journal entries directly?

As an example, Postbooks lets you put things into A/P using a REST API or by doing an SQL INSERT on one of their API tables:

https://github.com/xtuple/xtuple/wiki/Data-Import---API-views

Using the latter method, you can also create your own custom tables in the PostgreSQL schema and use them in queries that join with the API tables.

Once things are in there, the bookkeeper can look at them in the GUI just like entries added by hand.  They also appear correctly in reports and the balance sheet.

I don't think this is something you can only do with Postbooks though, I am just giving that link as an example.

Regards,

Daniel