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Customer Account Statement

by
McPond Software, David McNeill
- 26/01/2018 09:39:17

I'm running community v10

I'd like to send account activity statements to my customers, showing their transactions for the month. A formal layout document, one for each customer.

Obviously a very common requirement.

I'll probably want to modify the statement, this is why I choose open source after all.

There is so much noise around the issue it is difficult to gauge which financial statement to start from.

First of all it's really annoying that Odoo community base doesn't have this feature (or I can't find it they've made it so 'minimal'). Makes it sufficiently incomplete as to be rejected by many potential users.

One would hope OCA would have a solution to this.

Seems it resides in account-financial-reporting, but I can't be sure because the headline README.md is so incomplete. The web site has no screen shots or cross reference or browsable directory to the github. INSTALL.md doesn't even exist.

The module page is very thin on detail.

a-f-r appears lightly maintained. Lots of uncommitted pull requests. Some low quality, some very active, some apparent valid but ignored. Lots of issues with no feedback.

Then the forks...so many. Which one is most widely followed? Which one (if any) is perhaps better maintained? Are they just all peoples particular quirks? Will anyone pull the useful variants back into trunk?

And the code. Ever heard of abstraction? For code supposedly written in 2016? What happens if I want 7 day statements. Tough luck, 30/60/90 is hard coded throughout. Other than 2 decimals? nup. Flexible or customer specific file names? no way. Database neutrality? Get forking.  Hey, it's open source, you welcome what you get and build on it. A pity it has to be on a poor base requiring refactoring though.

Am I being a bit hard on the community? Perhaps. But this is supposed to be one of the most active, popular ERPs in the open source world.  Issues like this get sorted promptly in other apex mega projects in fields of Python, like Django.  Does finance & accounting software really only attract mediocrity?


So, some questions for those with lots of Odoo experience


Why are so few people contributing back what they create in a meaningful way?  Many verbal stones are lobed at Odoo S.A. for being self centered, yet the 'community' is just as bad.

Then, more specifically, which code base should I work from to view and adapt my debtors statement? I'd prefer an open-item type, rather than balance forward.  Dual html and page layout output would be nice. Controls to email them, with filters, monthly would be useful. And sound code. Obviously I'd like to contribute back changes I make, configured nicely as options so people can enable/disable the bits I add. To a fork or trunk that doesn't ignore contributors.


Suggestions people?




David


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