#budget entry

This February, we've continued improving the product and have faced some serious challenges. It's been a hard month, but a good month, and the product is all the better for it.

Enhanced Quotes and Orders Version

The quotes and orders version have been enhanced with some additional fields. And a report now exist to enable you to Pivot the data using Excel's pivot report tables.

Lighter

I mentioned in the past we developed technology to load excel components on the fly, as needed. We've made a big push to offload all the non-essential code to the AddonsLink.Optional... add-ins. As such, the whole platform is now leaner and quicker to start.

Budget Improvements

In the past, our biggest challenge has been how to handle drastic changes to the accounts or jobs structure. Users can delete jobs and accounts out of their accounting package relatively easily. Doing so caused problems in the past in BudgetLink when budgets had been entered against these deleted items.

Similar problems could also happen when accounts were changed from detail to header.

We've looked at the problems experienced in the market and have come up with the best approach to resolve it.

BudgetLink now detects any structural changes that can cause problems and will warn the user which accounts or jobs have been deleted. It will still be able to read the budgeted values and display them against "virtual" accounts and jobs. Finally, the budget entry screen can be used to correct and edit the values. In fact, the solution is that robust that it should be able to preserve these figures indefinately.

It's been one of the biggest challenge to resolve but I believe we have finally designed and implemented the perfect solution.

Comment Improvements

We've also looked at how comments worked and have implemented notable improvements. The editing process should be subtantially faster on slower machines.

We've been making lots of changes in BudgetLink on various side of the platform. Here is a glimpse of what has been going on this month. 

Quickbooks

We've enhanced the get data process to query the data a lot quicker than it used to. As well, we've added some flow-control logic to query the periods/years required without querying the whole database (better performance and scales into the future).

   Xero

We've enhanced the AddonsLink/BudgetLink platform to be able to query data from the XERO accounting product. It's a nice first step in integrating with XERO. Further down the track, we'll be adding support for Tracking Categories (which we'll use like the Jobs in MYOB or Classes in Quickbooks) and the Journals data set.

   Budget Entry

We've been doing a lot of work on the Budget Entry side of things. The API we use has been enhanced to be a lot faster to enter budgets as well as support various layouts. This means we can have sheets:

with Accounts down the page and Months across,

Accounts down the page and Years across,

Jobs down the page and Months across,

etc.

On top of this, we've refined the way values can be copied from the source section and we've also enhanced the way the values can be adjusted (increased or decreased) using percentages or raw numbers.

   Reports

We had redesigned the concept of "selections" a while back in order to remove the "red arrow" selections that show up on reports but never went further with it.

We are now implementing this on the standard reports. This means the screens will provide more real-estate to view the reports. It also means some of the fancier options which were hidden are now available.

At full screen, the standard Monthly Profit and Loss report of the Monthly Profit and Loss Report Pack will look like this.

And pressing the refresh button will bring up this screen which replaces the previous "red arrow" selection buttons.

  You will now be able to change all the various selections and options of the report from one central location.