Hi Matthew

I have only just come across this post.

I completed an accounting project earlier this year. Features included:

Hierarchical classification of line items

Dynamic display of financials

Full support for journalling and trial balance

Full auditing trail of ledger entries

Automatic report generation including automatic creation of notes to the accounts

Export to PDF, CDF, XML, Excel

Data storage in MongoDB

You can see video of a very early version of the application here:

http://ibnhconsulting.blogspot.com.au/2014/10/a-dynamic-accounting-application.html

cheers

Mike

I'm not quite sure what you mean Raj. The basic problem is perhaps simple, though if, as I do, you wish to include cash flow forecasting that can be as complex as you like depending on which financial instruments you wish to include. In its most general form, cash flow forecasting is very likely undecidable! Actually I would be interested to see a simple mathematical model that captures the essential matters such as hierarchical accounts, taxation, profit & loss and balance sheet creation and this might be straightforward to implement in a naive way in Mathematica. But creating an interface which makes entering and editing large amounts of data rapidly and effectively is not simple, by any means. There are some decent open-source solutions out there such as Gnucash (as well as some very popular, but in my limited experience frustrating commercial packages: the one I've used the most is Sage which seemed to me to be designed primarily to prevent fraud on the part of the bookkeeper which is not a concern of mine with this project). There are features I dislike and others missing in Gnucash (particularly nested accounts, imports from html, undo, VAT accounting and cash flow forecasting); and although I could contribute to the Gnucash project directly, I find the development cycle and its requirements to learn the details of the languages used and code design methods just too much of an investment. Hence this project.

I'm glad you like the idea Vitaly, I was a little bit surprised my suggestion didn't generate interest before but suddenly interest seems to have appeared. Thank you for adding it to the collaboration board. Perhaps we can use this thread to get an idea of which features folks are most interested in.

Thanks, @Matthew Fairtlough , great! I also updated your to post wit this info so people se the link right away. I think what would be useful if you show some use-cases on this thread, - the workflow with the tools you are developing - if possible.

Yes, thank you @Marina Shchitova I had seen this feature and played with it a little but hadn't thought of using it in this context. A very good idea and the great thing about it is that the templates can be very easily edited (unlike in some implementations such as Gnucash).

Yes please Juan!

I do have some work I could share but it would take a while to clean it up; I can send a scruffy notebook with my initial ideas and coding if you like which might have some useful material in it. For a proper start though I think I should share something clear and simple so that the design can work well from the start and that will take a little time.