osC needs some gross accounting tools

[joeyjgarcia]

I know osC is not for accounting but why not add some tools in the admin area for "gross" accounting features, something that we can build on over the years.

 

My business has no employees that I have to pay a salary to.

 

My expenses:

Hosting

Gateway & Merchant account

Business Bank Account

Drop Ship Supplier

Marketing Campaigns (Google, etc, ...)

 

My income:

Google's adSense

Sale's revenue

Misc income

 

This is pretty simple, I think I need a whole lot of software to manage this.

 

Here are my suggestions.

 

1) Add a page in the admin area for product categories and a price associated with each category. For example, Category: Adult T-Shirts, Cost: $10.

 

2) In the Add New Products page select from a drop-down list the category that the product you are adding belongs to. For example, you would select Adult T-Shirts.

 

3) Have a place where you could run monthly reports for all sales for each month and see a sub-total for gross sales and a sub-total for sales profit and a sub-total for Drop Shipper expenses

 

By adding these four suggestions to osC, I still think osC is not over extending itself since it already does reports for orders.

 

I could see many other related contributions added to this foundation, such as it keeping track of your other expenses too like hosting, Credit Card fees, and marketing campaigns. All of which are realted to the webstore, thus making osC a more complete package.

 

What do you think????

 

Joey

[blueline]

Please continue to watch Margin Report v1.00.

 

I have a lot of things I plan on doing to enhance the contribution over the next few weeks.

 

-Chris

[Guest]

sales reports are very easy to generate with a few simple clicks of downloading data from your site into your local spreadsheet. there are numerous spreadsheet programs available, so you do not even have to purchase one.

then it is simple math forumulas to extract the data and get the sales info you need. it all depends upon how much info you really need. if you are generating tons of sales, etc, and are constantly adding employees, then it is probably time to do a custom app interfacing accounting, as many of my customers have. they still use osCommerce but now have interfaced their particular apps.

[blueline]

John,

 

Very true. I have numerous clients that request custom apps to integrate osC data into company-wide ERPs and DSS systems. This is the best way to go....given you have the resources.

 

-Chris

[Guest]

Long term (3+ months?), I'd like to integrate a low weight, open source accounting package into osC. I did some initial research last night and think Aria might fit the bill. Just an FYI... or if anyone has a copious amount of time and would like to tackle it in the meantime, by all means please do. :)

[joeyjgarcia]

Good suggestion, I found that tool at http://arias.sourceforge.net/index.html.

 

So would you suggest that some bridging utilities be made to insert osC's order into Aria's? And other utilities for anything else they have in common?

 

I think I will have to add at least one more field to my Add New Products page, something called "Cost Price". I could foresee that this field would be useful for accounting.

 

Is Nola dead? I read that Aria is a spinoff of Nola because Nola was having some stability issues.

 

I'll have to download and install Aria and take a look at it. It seems to be sufficient in some cases and more than I need (employee payroll) in other cases. I would just like to have something that I could eliminate the redundancy of having to enter data twice and something that can help me perform my taxes when I need to.

 

Any other ideas?