At heart, Goldenseal is a database program. It shows you screens to enter different types of company info, which it then saves to your hard drive. After that, Goldenseal helps you to use all that hard-earned data. You can look up past records, print business forms, view reports, reconcile bank statements, run special operations like Pay Bills and Write Payroll, etc.
Business data is more complicated than your usual address book database, because it is very interrelated. For example, when you enter a material purchase, it needs to link with a vendor account (for Accounts Payable), a project account (for job costing and T&M billing), and a bank account (when you pay for it, now or later). It may also link to Cost Items and Assembles, to update their prices for future estimates.
When you save a new record, we also update all the related records. That process is called posting. It happens during the “thunk” sound you hear, after a save. During posting, we first open and revise all the linked items. Then we write everything to disk at the same time, to reduce the risk they get out of sync.
Goldenseal currently posts and saves whenever you close a window, print it, or move to a different record. You also can force a save when you hit the Enter key, or choose Save Record from the Edit menu. Before the save happens, we check to make sure everything makes sense. If important data is missing, you’ll see a warning message. That prevents half-finished records that won’t post properly.
When you switch from one window to another, we don’t post or save. That way, if you are in the middle of an estimate and the phone rings, you can just leave it unfinished, and go look at something else. It can stay that way until you switch estimates, close that window, or quit/exit.
Goldenseal Pro uses a single-window interface, with each type of record in a tab, rather than a separate window. The saving and posting process is exactly the same. We probably can mark the tabs that have unfinished records.
We are currently working on the code that saves data from new or changed records. We wrote that part of Goldenseal almost 20 years ago, so half the battle is remembering how the current version does it. At the moment we are stepping through the code, simultaneously and slowly, on an old Mac, a new Mac and a Windows machine. It could easily take another week or two to fully understand the old system, so we can write new ones.
Fortunately, the existing database ‘back end’ and the posting process still work fine, and won’t need any changes.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com