🚀 go-pugleaf

[Note from Jeff: One last message related to John S. Howell's
(howell@hodgkin.med.upenn.edu) original question related to
internationalizing accounting software]

Gerard Ho (gho.mv.us.adobe.com) wrote:

> localizing accounting software is not an easy task. The way people do
> business in each country is different, therefore you either have to
> find a common set of features to include in your product (leaving
> some out)

Or you can go the hard route and include the superset of all possible
operations in the application, and have the localizer strip out the
parts that are not needed for each country from the user interface.
This requires some extra work in flexible interface definition and
of course the extra functionality, but could pay off in code maintainability.

>      electronic payments. I also know that in France, you'll need to add
>      support for the Minitel and that in Germany, people don't write
>      checks.

Not writing cheques is probably pan-european (definately true in
Sweden anyway) since we, generally speaking, have a better
money transfer (aka Giro) system. Companies also usually subscribe
to electronic transfer initiation, which requires either your
program generating a specific file format, or knowing about each
bank's cryptography and signing algorithms...

Hope this helps!