Bristol Wireless News

Malcolm, a friendly chartered accountant who helps with our books, recently emailed our treasurer his opinions on Gnucash, the personal and small-business financial-accounting software that runs on GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and that other unspoken OS from Redmond. His words are reproduced below:

Couldn’t resist the lure of FREE* software, so downloaded it and imported a Quicken file into it. It worked pretty well, not 100%, but with a bit of practice it shouldn’t be too hard to work out why some transactions drop out. It certainly looked good and was easy to use.

If you were starting from a blank page, mapping errors wouldn’t be a problem of course, but it might take several trials to finally make sure that all data get mapped from an Intuit file to a Gnu file. More practically, you could import the chart of accounts, but lose all the history and just start with the prior period’s closing balances carried forward.

It isn’t as good as Quicken was, and in particular you can’t pick a payee and run a report of all payments made to XYZ… Instead you have to run a report of all payments made to all payees sorted a-z and then scroll down to XYZ. Standard reports are very few, but the custom report designer is pretty flexible, and lets you choose any start and end date, as Quicken does. It’s pretty much on a par with QuickBooks SimpleStart, which is also free in the US, although there is still a modest charge for it in the UK. If you don’t need VAT or the £ symbol, you can use the $ version though. Good psychology as when users find they need more crunching power, they upgrade to the full product more often than not, on the devil you know basis.

The way Gnu copes with VAT seems quite laborious though, requiring quite a lot of master file maintenance to set up an extra level in the chart of accounts, so that income and expenditure are first separated into VAT/non-VAT and then each of those sectors has to be broken down into the normal profit and loss categories, interest, council tax and wages, etc in one, and sales, goods, stationery, etc. in the other. You then have to build custom reports to select and aggregate the VAT-designated items into one report. Aaaaaargh!

Gnucash seems much more of a replacement for Quicken/MS Money personal finance software than for QuickBooks at this stage, although enthusiastic users could create QB-style standard charts of accounts and VAT templates and compile them into code for the General Good perhaps. However, three or four days of non-volunteer data processing and conversion time costs a lot more than another copy of QuickBooks. It would suit a lot of small traders though. The use of QIF (Quicken interchange format I think) as standard probably means that if anyone has the patience to keep their books on it, it could be exported into real QuickBooks for easier handling, again subject to an accurate mapping template between the two charts of accounts. Definitely worth keeping an eye on, but not quite there yet.

Best Regards,

Malcolm

* = That’s also free as in freedom Malcolm, as well as free as in beer

Our friend Kevin of Connecting Bristol has written to give us another date for the diary. On 19th May Connecting Bristol will be supporting a seminar, in association with Business West, aimed at giving a comprehensive overview of using online ‘new media’ channels and making the web work hard for your organisation – whether it’s in the corporate, community, charity or public sector.

Here are the basic details:

• Venue: Watershed, 1 Canons Rd, Bristol BS1 5TX
• Booking: events@businesswest.co.uk
• Price: £10
• Time: 9 am – 12 noon

Full details are on the Connecting Bristol blog.

Bristol Wireless are hosting an evening of radical geekery at St Werburghs Centre (Horley Road http://www.blex.co.uk/lilurl/96 ) on Sunday 11th May from 5.30pm. You’re invited to try out some of the excellent projects they’ve been developing with free software and discarded computer kit, listen to talks on the rise of the Creative Commons movement, learn about the history of Bristol Wireless and watch a movie (from 7pm) on the rise of the Linux Operating System. Bar open all evening. Tunes & stories from 8.30 to 10pm from Radio Vague ( The Sunday Roast – http://www.radiovague.com/sundayroast/ ) , Eastons biggest free software internet radio broadasting network. Donations Welcome!

Digital Inclusion Conference, The Brewery, London, Tuesday 30 April 08

Only two-thirds of people go online in the UK. The remaining third don’t use the internet at all. That’s 17 million people who are ‘digitally excluded’. This conference set out to address this remaining third. The government are so keen to address this issue that they’ve even created a new ministerial position for it: Minister for Digital Inclusion (currently Paul Murphy).

This conference was hosted by ukonline centres, a quango which administers funding to encourage ICT in the community and is sponsored by the big boys, including Microsoft, BT, Intel and the EU. The conference was well attended by people from government offices, city councils and other national public bodies. When asked to raise our hands if we were from a voluntary project, only four people did out of at least 200 people. Seeing as how much the government is willing to fund large organisations to meet the challenge and BW felt that we are doing our own little bit in getting people connected, we went along hoping for funding opportunities and contacts.

BW also felt able to give an insight into some of the issues being addressed. Half of the 17 million who don’t use the internet are in social groups D and E – the poorest in our society. BT’s attempts to connect the nation fail when they refuse to give connectivity to families with CCJs (county court judgements or poor credit history). BW consider information to be a right, not a privilege, and offer free access for all through our wireless network.

Matters discussed were quite wide-ranging and interesting: one speaker made the comment that kid’s play areas had been cut by 85% in the physical realm, but that 85% had been taken up by the internet and suggested that education was necessary to keep kids safe. However, speakers’ comments and topics of interest varied downwards from this to what a jolly good thing email is, to how great it was to send digital photos by email to the ‘Great Firewall of China’ and how the UK could benefit from such far-thinking policies. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Stephen Gowland, Digital Challenge Programme Director for Sunderland City Council, described how difficult it was to spend the £7m Digital Challenge winnings, having spent nearly a year trying to fill the positions with staff still struggling to meet his objectives. What Bristol Wireless would have done with that £7m (apart from tucking it safely behind the bar of our favourite hostelry) would have been to enhance the projects which we’ve already got running here in Bristol, with the people who are already in place running them: for example, more supported housing community rooms providing access and training, a larger wireless network, financing media companies for local IPTV, radio and so on.

On a lighter note, I did get to talk to some of the ukonline centre’s movers and shakers, who were interested in Bristol Wireless’ open source model. Free software for the masses, low-spec PCs running the latest operating systems and programmes, which means that hardware is easily and cheaply available. (See £50 PCs from BW …)

Thanks to Connecting Bristol and ICT Hub South West for the opportunity to attend this conference.

For more media coverage check out this link.