Unix & accounting software

[Bill Stewart 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs]

In article <25032 at agate.BERKELEY.EDU> mchawi at garnet.berkeley.edu writes:
]	I represent a group of intense c hackers out of UC Berkeley
]	on a very small shoestring who have set out to create the
]	best accounting software that exists.  With that apology,
]	please forward this letter to the nearest accountant that
]	is staring at a Sun and wondering what to do with it:
		[ what to do with it? - you pay for it from the	  ]
		[ capital budget and use accelerated depreciation ]

I'm posting a followup rather than  replying directly because I've
occasionally had to find accounting systems, and the market was
pretty thin the last time.

The one requirement I'd place on *any* new accounting system is that
it had better use a standard DBMS interface.  I'll tolerate
something wired directly onto Oracle or Informix, but I'd prefer
something that speaks raw SQL and doesn't really care which  DBMS is
underneath.  Why?  Because I'm going to need the flexibility to
customize things,  build my  own reports, feed the accounting data
into the inventory system or the quality control system or the
robotic-warehouse-reconfigurator (next year, anyway.)  Because if
the system's any good, I'll want to interface it with things I
haven't bought yet, to solve problems neither you nor I  have
thought about yet.  And I want to be sure it'll run  on my current
machine, my next (or NeXT) machine, whatever.

I'd also prefer it to be curses-based, but alternatively I'll take X
Windows or maybe NeWS.  But no Sun-specific interfaces.

When  I was in college, I had a summer job  hacking an IBM System 34
for a small steel fabrication  company.  The machine was desk-sized,
had 48K of RAM and a 13 MB Winchester, spoke RPG II, and came with two IBM
representatives who kept the machine happy.  In  addition to the
steel-job estimation  program I was hacking, its main activity was
to do the payroll, billing, etc., and I was trying to teach  it
cost accounting as well.   The IBM guys always had to make adjustments
to the accounting system - the steel fabricating industry has a
number of accounting requirements that are different from
conventional manufacturing accounting systems (e.g. you *never* get
paid  the full amount until the building has been standing for a
year without falling down).  Every time IBM came out with a fix or
upgrade ( ~ monthly), the IBM guys had to install it and then
repatch the local mods.

This kind of rearrangement and customization are much easier in a
modular standards-based environment than in a custom-coded system.
-- 
# Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218 Holmdel NJ 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs
	# also cloned at 201-271-4712 tarpon.att.com!wcs 

#			... counting stars by candle light ....