"Thinking of your firm's current planning cycle, how important is each of the following goals? The top 3 answers were: 1. Improve integration between applications. 2. Reduce IT costs. 3. Use information technologies to improve innovation." from a recent survey of small medium businesses.
You run a small business. You don't mess with fancy software that is overkill for the size of your business. However, you do leverage technology to keep costs down and, more importantly, to provide quicker and better service to your customers. Providing customized service at lightning speed is the name of your game. That is your strength. That is your unique value proposition. That is where the big boys cannot even begin to touch you. You are constantly looking for ways to provide customized service and ways to speed it up. In addition to GnuCash, you use a few other applications to run your business. However, you find that your team is often copying and pasting data from one system to the other. It is probably OK if this has to be done once in a while. However, if it is done often, it wastes time, frustrates people, and leads to mistakes, expensive mistakes, such as shipping a product to the wrong address.
What you are looking for are inexpensive ways to transfer data from one system to another. For most of the data, if you can sync up once a week, that should be enough. For some types of data, you may need to do it once a day. This data sync up from one application to another is what goes by the fancy name of Application Integration. You can get scripts written and scheduled to run weekly or nightly; that will keep the data among these applications in sync. However, in the past, you were frustrated by the limited ability of GnuCash to export data, but not anymore. Say "Hello" to GnuCash's new feature to export to a SQL database. You can get all of the data from GnuCash in convenient ways that can be used with popular querying and reporting tools.
Once you get GnuCash data into databases, you can not only query the data and use it for application integration, but you can also create highly customized reports and charts using third-party software as well.
In this chapter, we shall:
- Learn how to export the GnuCash data into popular database formats.
- Use popular query tools to extract the data we need from the database.
- Use popular reporting tools to create custom reports and charts.
- Create application integration to import this data into other applications.
- In addition, we shall also learn how to handle foreign currency transactions in GnuCash.
- Use the Customer Job and Vendor Job features of GnuCash.
- Learn special actions such as voiding a transaction, adding a reversing transaction, and year-end closing of books.
- Learn about inventory management and mileage tracking.
So let's get on with it...
This chapter assumes a certain level of proficiency.
- We assume that you can find, evaluate, select, and install software, such as ODBC drivers, and configure them.
- We assume that you are proficient in one of the two leading office applications OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office.
- Unlike the GnuCash tutorials so far, which were not only step-by-step but also provided additional tips and pointed out pitfalls along the way, the third-party software tutorials will be illustrative, because these are out of the scope of this book.
If you are not that familiar with these, you might want to spend some time doing some self-study tutorials, or get help from a knowledgeable person. While we show the use of OpenOffice.org for the query and Microsoft Office for the custom reports and charts, you can stick to the one you are most comfortable with.