Our staff is gradually finishing the action commands that make accounting easier.
One of the hardest is Project Billing. Goldenseal currently has five different menu commands for it. They handle three ways to bill for projects (draw schedules, progress payments or time & materials), plus allowances and change orders.
In TurtleSoft Pro there is just one Project Billing command. After you open the window, you can switch to each type of billing. It’s easier, especially if you don’t remember how a project was set up.
A few weeks ago, we took a huge, cluttered data structure for Deposit Funds and whittled it down. For Project Billing, things went in the opposite direction. Each type of billing used its own data structure that was passed around to all sorts of places. They were similar, but each had its quirks. We merged them all into one.
Another tough one is the Write Payroll command. In fact, payroll is probably the most complicated thing in our accounting software. The window shows a list of employees, with payroll info for one pay period. That’s not hard, but looking at the details is the opposite. Depending on where you click, it will show employee hours, commissions, deductions, employer taxes, benefits, or holiday/vacation pay. There’s also a breakdown for category taxes, mostly used in states that base worker’s comp on the type of work done.
Goldenseal uses seven different breakdown windows for Write Payroll, one for each type of details. TurtleSoft Pro has just one window for everything. It fills in different table columns and different data for each type of display. The data structure didn’t change, but we had to do a lot of copy/paste to get all the code into the same place.
We aren’t yet finished with Write Payroll. Fortunately, once the interface works, it links into well-tested business logic that does not need to change. That’s also the case for the other action commands. Mostly we have to futz with the text for table cells.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
