Our accounting software handles both accrual and cash accounting. It’s a distinction that confuses many people. Fortunately, you don’t need to know anything about them when you use Goldenseal. Ditto for the upcoming TurtleSoft Pro.
Job costing usually comes from the accrual transactions: material purchases, subcontractor & other invoices, labor & equipment hours. They have all the details needed for accurate estimate vs actual tracking. Usually, they also are the first time you find out about expenses.
Most cash transactions happen automatically. If you buy something and pay with cash/check/credit card, the app makes an instant payment to handle the money. If not, the expense becomes Accounts Payable, which you pay with the Pay Bills command.
Last week, our staff moved on to bank transactions, which handle the cash accounting. They are harder than the accrual stuff, because we made big changes. Goldenseal had separate cash, checking, credit card, loan, and savings accounts. The new accounting software merges them all into just plain old bank accounts. Transaction layouts are simpler. We also made it possible to see many different accounts at the same time.
The new setup is a big improvement, but it took a few days to get past the bugs and error messages caused by the changes. Most are now fixed, though it’s likely a few more will pop up in later testing.
We also moved on to the action commands (Pay Bills, Write Payroll, Deposit Funds, Project/Sales Billing, Job Costing, Reconcile). For large projects like this, it’s easy to forget what is already finished, and what isn’t. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that those already work. They aren’t perfect, but the remaining bugs will shake out during final testing.
Payroll and Estimating are last on the to-do list, because they are the most complicated. We also jumped ahead and started work on those. They don’t look all that bad.
It’s almost at the punch-list phase of the project. Down to loose ends.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
