#budgetlink

The latest work we've been focusing on of late is the new BudgetLink wiki. Help is comming.

We've been working hard of late to create training videos around our product line. Check them out here.

Quickbooks Weekly Reports

In 2011, we had to create weekly reports for a client who used MYOB. We did a lot of core development to be able to provide those reports. However, this IP stayed there and never progressed.

Finally, in February/March this year, we received a project to do the same for Quickbooks. It was a bit tricky but I was surprised how solid what we had done 2 years ago was.

We hadn't tested it since that first project. Yet the core of the architecture still worked. We can now do weekly reports for Quickbooks. And we can also capture budget values by weeks.

It amazes me sometimes how solid our product is. Hugely complex algorithms can sometimes be added and while the impact seems high, it all fits nicely together. Amazing!!!

While MYOB comes with many standard reports, it was enlightening for me to find out that many users were out there which did not have the reports they needed.

As such, these users typically exported various reports to excel and re-coupled them together with many complex formulas.

The AddonsLink platform we created allows you to create those reports using more rigorous software development practices.

Overview

AddonsLink has a module called Data Warehouses. This module allows you to define various Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL Server databases which will store data downloaded from MYOB.

The standard get data process that BudgetLink, TimesheetLink and FormLink uses also downloads data to custom data warehouses. In fact, those products use the exact same technology.

The data warehouses can be programmed to pull the necessary tables simply by ticking them in the list. The get data process will flesh out the fields and populate the data.

Once this process has run, the data warehouse can be enhanced with custom SQL queries to shape the data as required.

The performance of those queries is surprisingly good since the data is cached locally to disk. On top of this, certain queries can be created to compute and store the results similar to the way stored procedures work.

It does not only work with MYOB but also integrate with some tables from Xero and Quickbooks. This means that both Quickbooks and Xero get an ODBC/OLEDB like access using this technology.

If you've ever wanted to create your own reports, knew a bit of SQL (or could design basic queries using the query designers) and feel up to the challenge, the data warehousing capacity of the AddonsLink platform could be for you.

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.

A new year, a new set of goals. And January has been an exciting month.

BudgetLink Licenses

BudgetLink will now come in 4 distinct editions. Free (yes, FREE), Advanced Budgeting, Advanced Reporting and Enterprise.

Enterprise is the full featured BudgetLink you all know combining both Advanced Reporting and Advanced Budgeting. 

Advanced Reporting is cheaper and while it doesn't let you extensively budget, it will offer all the power of the reporting side (account hierarchies, account sets, job sets, drilldown, etc.)

Advanced Budgeting will have all the muscle of the budgeting engine, without all the reporting features of advanced reporting.

And what's in the free edition. Plenty. It can connect to MYOB, Quickbooks and Xero. It allows for a single budget version. Most reports are included. It can consolidate multiple data files (albeit without using the account hierarchies functionality). All in all, a great little package without any cost.

Trials

We've redesigned the trialing approach so that all products (TimesheetLink, DirectDebitsLink, FormLink, etc.) can be trialled. While some products require some extensive setup, it does mean most users can now get started quickly.

On this point, you can now choose which edition of BudgetLink you want to trial. 

Drilldown and Account Hierarchies

Drilldown can now work with Account Hierarchies.

Publishing

You can now publish your report to a single workbook (as before) or to multiple workbooks (if you need a new workbook for each job you selected).

  XERO

The setup process with XERO has been refined. It is now a breeze to setup BudgetLink to connect with your XERO data. You only need to tell it you want a Xero connection. No more guesswork regarding consumer keys or secrets. That whole technology has all been moved under the hood.

Easy. 

December was a lean month. And with the x-mas fiasco, I just didn't have enough time to post anything. January's been much the same.

There has been one substantial improvement in BudgetLink.

Accruals by Categories/Cost Centres for MYOB

MYOB has the ability to tag transaction against a category. We can now report numbers against these categories, similar to the way we do with jobs. More than this, both categories and jobs are support concurrently, so if you use both you have a lot of power at your fingertips.

All old reports are fully forward compatible which is no mean feat. Although we still need to weave the category filters on many reports. 

Interested? Download the latest trial.

September has been a month dedicated more to client projects than the actual platform. As such, the list of enhancements is fairly short.

Trial Process

Prospective users who will trial BudgetLink no longer need to obtain a registration key before hand. The platform now has the smarts to detect which product it is and will automatically be able to start a 10-day trial on first use. It's nothing to get too excited about but is one less hurdles to jump through.

As always, trials can be extended if you run out of time. 

Filters

We've done some work with filters. You can now synchronise filters across all reports such that any customisation made on one report will be cached and applied to other reports.

Relating to this, the filters will also be stored between use so that you can pickup your reports exactly where you left off.

Default Account Hierarchy when Consolidating

When consolidating multiple data files together, BudgetLink will automatically create an alternate account hierarchy from the master company data file in order to ease the initial setup. 

Fixes, Fixes and More Fixes

We've done fixes for networking improvements and fixes to support old school Windows XP function calls.