In answer to your last question, I do think that it is appropriate to
post this stuff to the debian-lex list, hence full quoting your message
and cc'ing there. Others may have different ideas of how to do legal
accounting than using SQL-Ledger which is still a bit of a square peg
for a round hole (although I'm trying, slowly, to bash it into shape).
On Wed, 2003-06-11 at 15:25, Tom Dossis wrote:
>
> Jeremy Malcolm wrote:
> >
> > Attached is a chart of accounts, just saved off my Web browser (numbers
> > have been munged). It looks crap without the style sheet. The "GIFI"
> > means a consolidated view of your accounts, which I am using to
> > consolidate the individual client trust accounts together, and also to
> > create consolidated tax accounts for GST ("Taxable Supplies",
> > "Non-Capital Purchases", etc.).
>
> I follow that...
>
> When recently working with CLO (legal accounting database) for 40~50
> staff firm, there were approx. 25000 clients and 12000 active
> (unarchived) matters. (By the way I imported this client/matter into
> sql-ledger to play around with).
>
> This scale of application would require job/project/matter based
> accounting, ie. each job would account: budget, WIP, disbursements, etc.
>
> I see that sql-ledger maintains a project_id reference in some tables,
> but there is no 'specific' job/project module/report (AFAIK)?
This is its biggest deficiency. The project_id reference is a very
half-arsed feature which is almost useless at present. The next release
of the software will make more use of it, but it still mightn't do what
we need for it, in which case I'll merge my current hacks into the code
and submit them upstream.
> > There is a bill attached also (it can do bills in HTML format if you
> > prefer and can email them out). I have scripts that import time entries
> > from GnoTime (Gnome TimeTracker), and export clients and matters to
> > GnoTime, but these are unreleasable as yet. A proper time charging
> > module is what I'm working on.
>
> Is this module for sql-ledger?
Yes. I am using it, but it isn't ready for prime-time.
> > Not sure what you mean about typical transaction types. Some sorts of
> > transactions (eg. invoices) are entered using a specially designed
> > interface appropriate for that purpose, but generic transactions are
> > entered using a general ledger (ie. journal) screen. You *do* need to
> > know your debits and credits with this program, it doesn't have a bunch
> > of wizards like Quickbooks and MYOB do.
>
> I guess I mean 'typical' accounting entries associated with project/time
> systems.
>
> Finally, are you aware of any others working on related OSS legal
> practice management software? The debian-lex mail list is the closest
> I've found to date - though I'm not sure how appropriate it is to post
> any of this stuff to it?
>
> -TD
--
JEREMY MALCOLM <Jeremy@Malcolm.id.au> Personal: http://www.malcolm.id.au
Providing online networks of Australian lawyers (http://www.ilaw.com.au)
and Linux experts (http://www.linuxconsultants.com.au) for instant help!
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