Ledger123.com

An interesting piece on Seth Godin’s blog.

I’ve always been frightened by big-firm accounting. The sort of financial legerdemain in which skilled accountants work hard to make the numbers look the way the CEO wants, instead of making them clear. Cash accounting run on a simple bookkeeping system is the small way to do it… even if your company is huge. That’s because sooner or later, management has to know what’s actually happening as opposed to what they can pretend is happening.

In part 1 we discussed the code changes required to define department and warehouse defaults for each user through admin.pl.

In this part we have made some code changes which will restrict a user to the data he or she created for his or her department and/or warehouse.

If the following two conditions are met …

1. A department and/or warehouse has been defined for a user.
2. The user belongs to the role ‘user’

… then the user can create new transactions in to his default department and/or warehouse only. He is also restricted to view reports for his department and/or warehouse only.

You can view these code changes here using git diff.

Any bugs or suggestions can be sent to support@ledger123.com.

We are grateful to Chris Travers for mentioning our name at LedgerSMB.org website and providing link to our virtual machine wiki page.

LedgerSMB started as a fork of sql-ledger. It is an open source project with open development model and a friendly community.

We have made some changes to sql-ledger code which will allow you to define default department and warehouse for each user through admin.pl.

You can view this patch here.

You can specify image filenames when adding or changing parts.

When you display your parts using Goods & Services–Reports–Parts and check Image checkbox, thumbnails for these images are shown. When you click on the thumbnail, the image is shown in actual size.

There is a ROP (Re-Order Point) column on parts file. You can set this column to the minimum quantity you have to stock in your inventory. A simple sql statement like the following can show the items that are below the ROP quantity and need to be ordered.


SELECT partnumber, description, onhand, rop, rop - onhand AS ordqty
FROM parts
WHERE onhand < rop
AND inventory_accno_id IS NULL
ORDER BY partnumber


You can run this sql statement in psql, phpPgAdmin or build a new report using our custom report template.

We are planning to put together a new virtual appliance for sql-ledger (as well as for ledgersmb). There will be two appliances. One will be based on FreeBSD and the other will be on Ubuntu JeOS (as recommended by Jeff Kowalczyk)

We already provide a FreeBSD 7.0 based sql-ledger/ledgersmb appliance. A number of people are not comfortable with FreeBSD so we are building another one based on Linux.

Your suggestions are welcome.

In sql-ledger you can convert a quotation to sales order or an rfq (request for quotation) to a purchase order. The order screen does not display the quotation/rfq number you are converting from. Though this value is stored in a hidden form element ‘quonumber’.

This small patch allows you to display this number on the order screen if you need it. The following image shows RFQ on a purchase order form.

Click here to view the patch.

There is no built-in support in sql-ledger to email reports periodically but you can easily build a shell script which will do so. The trick is to call sql-ledger API through command line to generate the report into an html file and then use mutt to email the report.

For example following call to API from command line will generate the AR Outstanding report to an html file in /tmp folder. (backslash is continuation character)


/usr/local/www/data/sql-ledger/ar.pl "path=bin/mozilla\
&login=armaghan\
&password=armaghan\
&action=continue\
&nextsub=transactions\
&summarY=1&open=Y\
&l_amount=Y\
&l_description=Y\
&l_invnumber=Y\
&l_name=Y\
&l_paid=Y\
&l_transdate=Y\
&vc=customer\
&ARAP=AR\
&outstanding=1" > /tmp/outstanding.html


Once the report is generated, a mutt invocation will send the report to the intended recipient.


/usr/local/bin/mutt -a /tmp/outstanding.html \
-s 'Outstanding report' saqib@ledger123.com < /dev/null


Both these lines can be put into a shell script which can be run periodically through cron.

Request Tracker or RT is the tool we use to manage all our development, customization and support requests at ledger123.com. Out-of-box it is a ticketing system. But it is also an application development framework which you can use to build your own applications using Perl and Mason template system.

RT’s self-service interface allows our customers to view the status of their work online and browse any past requests and resolutions. RT is integrated with ledger123.com email so that any email to support@ledger123.com creates a ticket (and sends a password to the requester to access self-service interface) and all replies to that email get added to the ticket as transactions.

If you are looking for a support/help-desk system, give RT a try before settling on any thing else. RT is an open source application with excellent documentation wiki and a very active mailing list. It has been developed by bestpractical.com.

Hiveminder is a web-based things-to-do manager developed by the same company. It comes in free and pro versions. In our experience, free version is good enough for majority of the people. So give it a try if you are not ready for RT and want to start simple.