🚀 go-pugleaf

"Brendan Reynolds" <brenreyn@indigo.ie> wrote:

>Rather you than me, Tony! I've noticed that most of the big accounting
>packages seem to be 'geographically limited'. 

Ayup.  Amazed questions from USians "Postal code is alphanumeric?".
And then with all those strange variable length and format phone
numbers from outside North America?  Not a clue.  Of course the USians
spell cheque totally wrong.

>Even if you could come up with a truly international
>accounting application, how long would it remain so? As you indicated in
>your original post, it would have to be updated every time there was a
>government budget anywhere in the world!

Actually not accounting systems but invoicing systems.  Hence my
concern is only with sales taxes.

>The only practical way that I can see is to allow users (or rather,
>administrators) to change the tax details as necessary. I'm thinking along
>the lines of a lookup table of taxes, including a description and a rate,
>that could be updated by an administrator. 

Exactly.  

>You'd also need some kind of table of allowances. 

Allowances.

>Of course in this very simplistic example, a lot of
>decisions would have to be made by the user, such as which taxes apply to a
>particular transaction. 

Correct.  I was going to have line by line defaults and overall
defaults but allow anyone to override anything at all.  And I was
going to put an "O" beside each line which was overridden so someone
looking at it later, ie a tax auditor, could easily pick out the
differences.

>As soon as you start writing in rules to control
>those decisions, the app starts to become less internationally flexible.

Understood but no control.  Just defaults.

>I certainly don't have any kind of definitive answer on this. I'm just
>suggesting that there's a balance to be struck somewhere between two
>extremes, with international flexibility at one end of the spectrum and ease
>of use and control over input at the other.

I'm going to assume in my apps that the data entry folks aren't
minimum wage "Would you like fries with that?" type of people.  <sigh>

Tony
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Tony Toews, Independent Computer Consultant
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