Re: [gnue-sb-discuss] General Ledger and Accounts Payable

[Derek Neighbors]

Jason Cater said:
> One thing I do wonder about is that nola and descendants have a company,
> ar_company, and ap_company.  I wonder what's the use of separate company
> tables for each "module"?  I don't see a need for that myself; perhaps
> others can enlighten me.

Well currently I think we have laid out "vendors" which might be accounts
payable companies and we have "customer/client companies" which might be
accounts receivables.  We need more discussion, but I'm starting to think
"company" should be like "contact".  That is we make one table for company
and one for contact.  Then we have vendor, client tables which are nothing
more than an id, vendorid, companyid and id, clientid, companyid look up
tables.  I dont want to carry discussion too far at this point as dont
want my poor brain going too many directions at one time. ;)

> Also, I don't really think it's appropriate to group Mike's
> purchaseorder and my ap_invoice tables together as the same thing.  They
> really are not.  But they are complementary and would work together. I
> had not addressed a Purchase Order system yet as that's one of those "I
> would really like one" and not a "that is a critical feature that I must
> have today."

Absolutely its not fair.  It should have been at that the bottom with your
balance sheet stuff.  I forgot I handled your balance sheet that way.  I
wanted to show that AP and PO were related, but not insinuate that they
were the same thing. ;)

> I also noticed one major difference between my schema and others is I
> have balance tables. What are other people's feelings on this?  At first
> glance, some might say that this goes against proper normalization,
> which I believe in trying to adhere to.  However, one feature we've seen
> in other proprietary packages is, after a few years, you can "archive"
> old
> transaction information, but keep the balance information in place for
> reporting purposes.  Keeping a balance table would also be a performance
> boon.

I like static balance sheets, even though it violates 'normalization'.

-Derek