Bend in the Weather

Don't get me wrong... I love a bargain as much as the next guy or girl.

What I don't like however is when a computer system is implemented with little regard and isn't actively checked by a human.
It's one way to make your company look like a jack-ass.

Sorry Woolworths - you've landed yourself in such a category.

Most Australian supermarket shoppers are aware of the fuel discounts offered by Coles and Woolworths, which can slice anything from $0.03 - $0.20 per litre of the cost of your fuel. Something that's always welcome by motorists.

It's the only reason I have an everyday rewards card. Fuel discounts add up over time, even more so for myself, as I drive with LPG the majority of the time, so $0.20 off per litre on LPG is quite substantial.

During the months of April and May Woolies decided that for 8 weeks straight I would like to buy wine. I'm not talking 1 bottle either. Most 'deals' require a purchase of 6 or more bottles in a given purchase.

A sample of the Email contents is included below:

To be honest, I love a good drop of red. Probably more so than the average punter. (We normally have a few dozen on hand in the house). At the end of March I had let our stocks go down over a period of time so had restocked. This seems to have triggered their rewards system to pester me for the next 8 weeks straight. No fuel offers (which was the main selling point of the card), nor any other offer... just grog.

At 6 bottles minimum per Email over 8 weeks, anyone reading my Email from Woolworths, would think I'm an alcoholic!

The crazy thing... It backfired.
I didn't buy any wine during that period. (As I had just restocked my levels.) This form of marketing happens 'after the fact', and as such it fails. If I have already made a bulk purchase, why would I wish to repeat it shortly after, and every week for a period of 8 weeks?

Woolworths reward system needs looking at. (As does Coles for that matter). It would be more beneficial to flag such bulk purchases of your customers, then look at sending it out 'specials' say every 3,6 or 12 months... you're likely to have a bigger uptake. I can't see my car dealership sending out a "buy a brand new car" Emails if I had just taken delivery of a new vehicle.

Certainly for everyday staples, it would be nice to have these filter through regularly. However don't see these, like 25% off either Meat, Fruit or Vegies for a week. It seems to be items like Coca-Cola, Alcohol and other non-essentials. I'm not surprised though... the supermarkets know we need staples.. and are trying to increase our trolley sizes by teasing us into buying these non-basic item.

Certainly I do hope that Woolworths and Coles both learn that their average shopper has the intelligence above that of a broken trolley wheel, as the current marketing strategies to date are quite insulting.

Ask any small business owner in Australia what drives them craziest running their business.
More often then not the answer will be their accounting software.

Why? It's not because they are unable to understand the principles of double-entry accounting or even the tax system imposed on them.

No, its the lack of a decent, flexible and affordable solution.

The two most popular business accounting packages for the SME is either MYOB and QuickBooks. Both have huge hurdles, and it's not uncommon for users to find that they spend more time attempting to work the software than the software working for them.

I have previously blogged about the issue when talking about how Linux is difficult for many Aussie SMEs to take up. (Mainly due to their critical accounting software only available under Windows, though it is possible to run them under WINE if required). Though getting these Windows programs running under Linux doesn't actually solve the problem, it just migrates it. You are still stuck attempting to drive these frustrating accounting packages.

The Australian market is crying out for an alternative! It's something I've pondered over for some time.

An OSS based accounting and payroll system that put the source code directly in the hands of the users would be appealing to many.

I like the idea of a browser-based accounting system. It means end-users aren't restricted to one operating system platform, and in theory it doesn't need to be restricted to just a computer. (3G Accounting anyone?).

Accounting isn't fun, in fact it's dead-pan boring. It is however a required evil if you wish to be paid and be compliant with the taxation law. (Particularly GST, BAS reporting and PAYG).

I've looked at programs like SQL-Ledger and LedgerSMB, though both didn't 'fit right' for an Australian environment.

SYMBOL was promising. But unfortunately has been abandoned. fiveDASH, I played with for several hours, though I found it quite primitive and in it's infancy... it's one that at least has some promise, but it will need to progress quite some way to make it in any real production system for a business.

As such, I've decided to look at writing my own. This is purely selfish, as I would like to ditch MYOB come the 2009-2010 financial year. That gives me just under a year to get something up and running. I'll run a dummy book up til the time, by running MYOB in parallel to ensure all is working as required. The ATO also has some excellent test suites/scenarios to assist in testing an application.

The big choice now is from what components should I build it?

I think PostgreSQL is probably the most solid OSS database to use, though writing something that can also talk to MySQL (due to it's popularity) is probably also wise. End-users can then elect to run whichever they feel most comfortable for their backend.

I considered many languages, but I'm leaning towards PHP for a few reasons:

• Most SMB that have a Linux server for File and Print serving also have a LAMP environment already setup.
• Writing the system using say the Zend Framework ensures a lot of the ground work is already done. Working within their coding standards also ensures the code is reasonably clean and readable (and thus maintainable).
• Python was also considered, but it's more likely a SMB has a Apache/PHP environment over an Apache/Python setup
• I already have quite a number of generic PHP libraries that will mean I can get moving much faster. My Python libraries are no-where as extensive.
• A Java-based web app would be an overkill and likely to confuse many small business owners. (ie: Install a Java Application Server, etc.)
• SugarCRM is already popular in many SMBs. It would be quite easy to have an Accounting + Payroll package integrate into SugarCRM. Sugar is written in PHP, so it would make the job much easier if they both spoke the same language.

I haven't commenced any coding to date, and am still in the embryo stage of getting something up off the ground.

I'm interested to hear people's feedback with their thoughts. Do you think a PHP application (backended by your choice of MySQL or PostgreSQL) for your business accounts is feasible? (Obviously if 'approved' by the ATO as compliant).

Do SMB owners prefer the option of paid software with support packs? (like offered by MYOB and Quicken) they can fall back on? Would you not trust your business books to an OSS based accounting package? What other hurdles do you envisage if you used OSS accounting software?

Wine is a way to run native Windows applications without Windows. The Wine project have been able to replicate the APIs required to run quite a number of applications under their environment. It's one way you can run your legacy Windows applications under your Linux desktop. I daily run Wine for a number of applications for business:

• Windows Lotus Notes for my office Email - it's not as crappy then as the native Linux one then. :-P
• Internet Explorer 6 for those pesky websites that refuse to run without IE (many customer client websites).
• Microsoft Office for some complicated files that get garbled by OpenOffice (but that number is decreasing with every release!)

Other good news about Wine is that 1.0 is just about out the door. (Don't be fooled by the low number - these guys are perfectionists, and it's been a long, long running project!) Here's the blurb off their website:

Friends, vintners, penguins, lend me your ears: We come not to praise Windows, but to celebrate our increasing independence from it. The final release candidate for Wine 1.0 will appear this Friday (13th), and barring catastrophe, Wine 1.0 itself will be released a few days later.

I recently blogged about how hard it is for many small businesses to move off Windows. One way they can (particularly those that are on pre-Vista desktops and don't wish to go to Vista) is to utilise Wine for those legacy business Windows applications that need to run. 8-) This way they can keep their functionality, but move to a more secure, less restrictive (licensing) operating system and a better and more richer computing experience in my opinion. :-) I recently attempted to see if I could run MYOB under Wine. Currently Pauline is stuck on Windows, due to her requirement to run MYOB to do our company books. MYOB ran under Wine without a hitch. :-D Well... until I went to print. It went off to the dark printing gods and spat out an empty plain page -- no matter what I printed. And thus is the reason for this blog post. If anyone does business accounting, you realise printing is a key feature. Many hectares of forests are destroyed each year keeping up with the legal requirement of keeping records accounting records. (Personally we print a lot to PDF -- but still, under Wine this was failing for us!). Scroll through many Linux forums/help sites and you'll hear people whining and complaining about printing under Wine. It seems to have also increased with the introduction of CUPS. From what I could see people where having problems printing to a physical printer most of the time, even though their CUPS printers correctly are represented and available in Wine. (This is exactly what I was seeing -- just blank pages printed). Unfortunately this was going to be a show-stopper. Without a way to print (paper or electronically) for MYOB the idea was dead in the water. I didn't want to run Windows XP in a virtual machine (more on that in my next post over the following days). I decided to sit down and take a bit of a fiddle (that's a technical term!) :-P Really -- if CUPS-PDF didn't work, and my native printers attached, even a Postscript file would be sufficient (I could then feed that into ps2pdf or something similar if I really wanted it in PDF format for Emailing, or just print the Postscript file directly to the printer. I found that within the printing application I could create a virtual printer that printed a postscript file directly to a file in Linux. Okay, that works fine under Linux... Now the big test, did it print fine with MYOB running under Wine? I could see the printer fine (as I could with all the other CUPS printers previously). I bit my bottom lip and hit print. Low and behold... a working report! 8-) Even better I could link the Postscript printer to the CUPS-PDF printer and it would convert it auto-magically into a PDF for me. I since tested a range of applications under Wine and they all seem to be printing. So if you need to print in Wine and don't want a headache, try the local Postscript virtual printer hack. It works well. :-D For those that want to replicate it, here is a series of pictures showing the Postscript printer properties. And if you still don't believe.... here is a sample print job... one in Windows with MYOB and one under Linux

How time flies.

Tomorrow (2^nd May) Pauline and I will have been married for 10 years!
It only seems like yesterday that we were two scared kids wondering what the hell we were getting ourselves into.

We can honestly say that it's been a great 10 years. Whilst like every couple we have our ups and downs, we generally have more ups then downs. We've both grown together and stronger as individuals.

This year, is a big year for us. We are building our first house, and potentially may start a family after that. So life moves on, always throwing more challenges and adventures.

To celebrate the milestone, we're heading away for the weekend.
I'm taking a few days off work to extend the stay. We're not heading too far, but enough so that we're out of mobile phone range and the hum of computer power supply fans for a few days.

We've decided to head up to Healesville. For those unaware, it's located North-West of Melbourne in the Yarra Ranges.


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There is tonnes to do there, and we indeed to make good use of our time! We're hoping to get to Healesville Sanctuary (Pauline is an animal loving nut - this is a must stop for us!), The Hedgend Maze, The Yarra Valley Railway (time permitting), as well as visiting a bunch of wineries in the region (Map here) (I wish to stock up the ever diminishing supply of good Australian Red/White wine I have.)

It will be good to get away for a quiet retreat and leave computers, mobiles, television and most of the usual suspects that distract us.

As I've already blogged, I got Pauline an eternity ring to mark the occasion. Pauline returned the favour by surprising me today with my own present!

She came home with a lovely watch. My existing watch had been banged up quite a bit and was in need of a new battery (though it did tell the time correctly twice every day!).

She couldn't wait to give it to me (she was planning on surprising me on the day and had to show me straight away!

It is indeed lovely, it's quite easy to read, balanced beautifully and quite an attractive piece of jewelry. I'm extremely happy with it. (I would of personally picked something like this - she has got my taste down pat!).

It's fantastic, we now both have something lasting to remember the milestone.

So we've packed our bags, getting the dog looked after and heading out early tomorrow. (Friday).
The camera has been thrown in so we will hopefully take some photos of the picturesque country that is the Yarra Valley.
Pauline's selected a lovely apartment for us to stay in, and it's been furnished in a lovely traditional Japanese style. I'm looking forward to staying there, as it looks divine.

I won't be near a computer or Internet access for half the week, so I suspect the Email will still keep rolling in.
For those of you wanting a response, please SMS me (I'm not sure when we'll have coverage), or wait for our return.

Whilst the weather forecast isn't ideal, it is strangely very similar to the weather we had on our wedding day! In any event we have a number of indoor and outdoor activities planned so I'm sure we'll have a blast.