Most of the accounts and business transactions work properly now in our new accounting software.
Right now our staff is tackling the 70+ lists: specs details for accounting, estimating, payroll and project management. They include cost categories, sales taxes, billing rates, payment terms, and more. Many have interface quirks, so we will go through and check all of them.
Some of the work is tweaky little appearance details. Make buttons gray when they don’t do anything. Change the display from money to percents. Get layouts to look good.
The harder part is getting all the parts and pieces to work together properly. Everything is functional, and most things are ready for prime time. But there are still little details here and there that can be improved.
There are lots of moving parts in our accounting software. Smart fields need to listen to their popup button. Ditto for their scrolling list of items. Records listen to the smart field. Eventually they save changes to disk, and post to other records. It all happens with links and messages and actions that get passed around in the code.
I complained about software complexity recently. TurtleSoft is as bad as anyone, when it comes to making things more complicated. We keep discovering finicky features that we added to Goldenseal between version 2.0 and 4.96. Some of them take hours or days to duplicate.
For example, Sales transactions have the option to show UPC codes. One user really wanted it. It’s quite possible that nobody else uses it. Right now it’s the only thing still unfinished there. Goldenseal has code to handle it, but we need to figure out how the Qt breakdown table can get at it. That’s 50% of what we do these days. Step through existing code, and decide whether to replace it or burrow a link to it.
Estimates and Payroll Records are the most complicated. Our staff has made a couple passes at them, but I’m sure they’ll consume another week or two apiece. That’s the next project when this phase is done.
One reason we switched over to lists for now is because they are small. If they have quirks, usually it’s just one apiece. If we are lucky, getting them to work will also solve some of the remaining problems elsewhere. Sometimes it’s better to do the easier stuff first.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
