BANAL version 0.03 - or BANAL's Absolutely Not A Ledger
August 1997
This file serves as the announcement that goes to the
comp.os.linux.announce and comp.lang.perl.announce newsgroups
as well as a message to the site maintainers at pgw.on.ca and
sunsite.unc.edu.
NOTE: The ftp server at pgw.on.ca is getting a little flakey. If
you are unable to connect, please try again or request it from the
mailing list manager (see below). It is about 86kB uuencode.
What is BANAL?
BANAL is a bookkeeping system that allows you to track invoices, clients,
projects and expenses (more stuff like bank accounts and TODOs will be
added later). BANAL is a client/server application so you can keep
one set of books one your system while allowing everyone access.
Although, I've written this for my own purposes as a consultant (because
no one else would do it), I know that others could make use of this
package.
What is new in this release?
- A mailing list for developers/beta testers (join if you want
to have input on the 1.00 version)
- Some more documentation
- Income statements
- Recurring transactions (and memorized ones for intermittant use)
- Banking and Todo databases
How do I subscribe to the mailing list?
Simply send an e-mail to majordomo@pgw.on.ca with the body of
the message (NOT the subject) saying: subscribe banal
You should receive confirmation shortly. Send your questions/comments
to: banal@pgw.on.ca
How do I obtain the distribution through e-mail?
Simply send an e-mail to majordomo@pgw.on.ca with the body of
the message (NOT the subject) saying: get banal latest
You should receive confirmation shortly.
If you want a specific version then substitute the word latest
with the version that you want. eg: get banal 0.03
Attention users of previous version!!
There are two items of particular interest. The first is that you
no longer have to double delimit the shell's special characters (eg. '>').
The second, and more important item, is if you are using the stock file
Invoice.ps file (PS prolog for the invoices). If this is your case
then you should change the names of the address fields in the company
database.
In the file Company.rdb, find the first line that does not begin with
the character '#'. On that line, change the string 'Address1' to
'AddressA' and 'Address2' to 'AddressB'. The name changes were made
to assist in making a LaTeX driver for documents.
What can it do?
For this release, BANAL can store your information, list (and allow
searching of) information and generate invoices and income statements.
You can also make and use recurring and memorized transactions to
ease the burden of creating them manually. Check the TODO file, included
with the distribution, for an idea of what is coming in the next
release.
I'm hoping to get some feedback on what others would like before I get
too caught up in my own specific situation.
How easy to use is it?
Currently, there is only a command line client (bk). The client
takes a subcommand to invoke some action. There are only three types of
subcommands: list, edit and print (print now includes statement and
runbatch).
By type of subcommand, I mean that to edit an invoice you type:
bk invoice
While to edit an expense you type:
bk expense
Once you've learned a subcommand, you've learned all of the subcommands
for that type.
How good is the documentation?
It should be adequate enough to get you started - the server running and
you running some simple commands. Let me know if this is not the case
and I'll clarify the text. The documentation is not for me (I know the
system) so your feedback is essential.
Where to get it?
If you want to obtain BANAL and try it out, ftp to
ftp://pgw.on.ca/pub/banal/
and look for a file banal-X.YY.tar.gz, with
X.YY being a version number (0.00 is of course the first).
Unpack it in a "sources" directory and start reading the document in
the "doc" subdirectory.
I've also uploaded this version to sunsite.unc.edu in incoming. It should
be moved to ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/financial/accounting.
What is the copyright?
FTL Solutions Inc. holds the copyright (I am
doing it under their time), however, it is very unrestricted (read: do
what you want but don't think of suing them). There is a more detailed
COPYRIGHT file included with the distribution.
Who should I contact ?
Right now the only person (or group) to contact is:
Matthew.Rice@ftlsol.com
Alternatively, you may subscribe to the BANAL mailing list (see above)
and ask questions there.