https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/1fu5v15/using_pta_for_a_small_business/
Hi all.. So I'm back with a few more questions for people that might know better than I. I am ultimately looking to see if I can find a small example of how someone using ledger, hledger or beancount for a small business might have things laid out for doing general accounting that they might be able to share.. (obfuscated small examples of course)
In my case we've got a non-profit and have quickbooks data going back for quite some time and my co-worker would really like some of the historical data if possible -- I can massage our CSV data as needed.
I think some of the questions I've got are stemming from the fact that I'm used to using Quickbooks with which has a database of vendors, customers and so forth.
This notion isn't as easily emulated in the PTA environment .. Maybe payee's are the same as vendors in ledger-cli parlance? and I've got accounts and aliases for customers/donors albeit with a spreadsheet behind the scenes to store contact info.
For vendors is that the best way to store address and contact info as well? I'm assuming so.
For vendors that require checks to be printed? What do you all do? Do you have some disconnected PC app that you make use of for printing checks on a printer or ?
Thanks for any direction you can provide..
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Hi Impressive. Just quick answers to get things rolling. I'm not sure which app you favour or how much programming you care to do so I'll be generic.
Take it a step at a time.
Historical reports on old CSV data from quickbooks: this is sometimes a less urgent background task since it's old data. To start with, treat the exported CSV as your master data. Figure out tools/rules to convert it to a journal. Use a script or Makefile to make this easy to rerun. Regenerate the journal repeatedly as you refine the conversion process. Allow some time for this. At some point in future, you might call it done and make the journal your master data - or not.
Yes payee, vendor/payer, customer names are generally the same field in PTA ("payee"). Unless you decide to use tags creatively. You may be able to declare their names and get an error if you use an undeclared or misspelled one.
Storing extra attributes like contact info: yes, it can be stored in your PTA journal as tags (or just comments), with more or less ability to query/display that data, depending. Or you can keep it separately, in a spreadsheet, which some people have advocated. You could try both for a while.
I'm guessing not too many PTA users are printing checks. There must be some free and commercial check printing tools out there, or you could make your own with a bit of scripting. Probably you'd want a language and library that makes it easy to generate PDF with precise positioning of each field, suitable for your check paper. PHP or python will be good at this, eg.
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