Beanie 0.1 review

Beanie is a flexible, distributed accounting system for medium-sized companies. It includes back-end batch processing as well as a

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Dermot Tynan

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Beanie is a flexible, distributed accounting system for medium-sized companies.

It includes back-end batch processing as well as a GTK GUI and provides automated purchases, sales, and nominal ledgers as well as automated invoicing (via email).

Beanie project also supports payroll and VAT.

Installation:

STEP ONE:

You must create a user on the system called 'beanie'. This unprivileged user will own all the accounting files and executables. The home directory of this user will be the main location for all accounting files so choose wisely. Examples are /v/beanie or
/var/accounts.

This is an example of the password entry:
beanie:*:101:20:The Accounting System:/v/beanie:/bin/csh

Make sure you set the 'BEANIEROOT' environment variable in the file beanie.mk to the home directory of the beanie user.

STEP TWO:

You must create a MySQL database called 'beanie'. You then need to create a user also called 'beanie' with a 8 to 10 character password which has full access to this database. Check that you can access the new database using the following command:

% mysql -h -u beanie -p beanie

You will be prompted for a password. Enter the password you set on the account and you're now ready to create a config.h file.

STEP THREE:

Copy the file config.h.sample to config.h and edit it. You will find information on how to configure this file in the comment blocks of the file. Note that the MAIN_DBHOST and DBPWD_CHARxx values need to match what you entered above.

STEP FOUR:

Edit the file beanie.mk and make sure that the defaults are OK.

Once you have completed these steps, compile the source by running the following commands:

% make clean all
% make install

You may need to run the second 'make' as root in order to have permissions to create directories and some binary files (such as xeparse which needs to be installed in /usr/libexec).

STEP FIVE:

You need to create a 'cron(8)' entry for the beanie user. There is a sample cron entry in the file crontab.sample. Edit this file and change $BEANIEROOT to be the home directory of the beanie user. Then, either logged in as beanie or as root, run the following command:

% crontab -u beanie < crontab.sample

This makes sure the overnight processing is performed every evening at 11PM. Each day, the databases will be backed up and the daily operations (such as invoicing, etc) will be performed. Each Sunday, the end of week tasks will be performed and on the last day of the month, the monthly, quarterly and annual tasks will be performed.
You can examine these scripts to see what they do:

overnight/acct.prolog
overnight/acct.daily
overnight/acct.weekly
overnight/acct.monthly
overnight/acct.epilog

Edit the 'tmac' source files for your specific information. The key one here is lhead.tmac because this is the source for your company letterhead. It's written in troff.

You're Done!! Now you just need to run the 'newcompany' program.

What's New in This Release:
In this initial release, the billing functionality is very complete and the general ledger functionality is pretty much all there.
A VAT system was added with a payroll check-in due very shortly.