1.
hassan84
[Avatar]
2009-10-04 09:42:13 GMT
Dear Adempiere Community,

I'm not accountant and not a programmer
but finally I'm should make a decision with which accounting package
and future accounting standard the company will use in all related operations therefore I have some comment to share and have some questions.

The past few months our team has evaluated some accounting ERP programs
(commercial and Open source) for our fast growing operation.
Currently there are three software packages in the final,
Adempiere is one of it.

Our company operation spreads around the Indian Ocean with offices in East Africa,
the Indian Sub Continent and South East Asia.
In India and Indonesia we have small production facilities.

For the base evaluation we use only Gardenworld data and
found out that Adempiere (Ver 3.4)
is quite extensive ERP solution but not very flexible in handling taxes especially withholding taxes for services which are common in many countries we operate offices. Also to add additional costs for goods on stock is not possible.

After some google search we found two solutions for withholding tax
one in Columbia localization and
a “Adempiere fork” in Thailand
(Saeree ERP – which does not provide a source code).

Thanks to Google Translate (Spanish - English)
service our team could install the Colombian localization into Gardenworld data.

Without playing too much we could get it work with the Gardenworld data.
The accounting figures are the way we need it in most countries.

But when we setup our own test client with some data
we still could not figure out how to configure it correctly.
But this is not the point yet for questioning.

I have some questions to the council / community:

1.)
Is there any reason not to include the Colombian Withholding tax solution in the trunk,
since I guess in almost every continent there will be one or more countries which has a source tax with a tax base which is not fully compatible to the document type system of Adempiere but gives Adempiere enormous flexibility?


2.)
Landed Cost does not work as in SAP and SAGE Accounting Systems standard,

which is a disadvantage mainly
when you have to export / import goods across boarders.
(cost of goods in stock = cost purchased + landed cost ((or +add monthly cost))).

Sales staff needs nowadays the accurate cost per item on stock immediately from the system therefore additional storage cost for an item must be added all time to the current cost. (Warehouse rent for 1000 tones corn, security, electricity, fumigation should be added every month to current product cost)
in these regards Adempiere is very clumsy.
Is there already a solution available for adding cost to an item on stock?

3.)Is Humanflash the commercial support arm of Adempiere or how it works since they are very predominant in Google?

Regards,
Hassan

2.
trifonntProject Admin

[Avatar]
2009-10-04 10:53:07 GMT
Dear Hassan,

i will try to answer some of your questions

> 1.) Is there any reason not to include the Colombian Withholding tax solution
> in the trunk

There is no political reason not to include Colombian Withholding functionality. As far as i know, this extension was used in Italy too.

My advice is if you could support original developer or some other CORE ADempiere developer to include it in trunk.


> 2.)Landed Cost does not work as in SAP and SAGE Accounting Systems standard,

3.4.2 is not good in Cost calculation. Only Standard costing is working in 3.4.2. new version (3.5.4a) is much better in Costing and i would recommend you to test it and report if it fits your needs.


> 3.)Is Humanflash the commercial support arm of Adempiere or how it
> works since they are very predominant
> in Google?


NO.
The best ADempiere support can be provided by ADempiere developers at this moment because ADempiere is evolving very fast and only developers truly know what is the last functionality.

Regards,
Trifon
www.catura.de
3.
globalqssSourceForge.net SubscriberProject Admin

[Avatar]
2009-10-04 18:40:18 GMT
Hi Hassan,

Good to hear you're considering Adempiere in your evaluation.

Please let me comment/ask/answer some of your post:

> "found out that Adempiere (Ver 3.4) is
> quite extensive ERP"

I'm just curious about this statement, "expensive" compared with?

I know implementing Adempiere is not free - but I'm curious to know which variables did you take into account to declare is "quite expensive". Not criticizing, just wondering.

> "a “Adempiere fork” in Thailand (Saeree
> ERP – which does not provide a source
> code)."

I didn't know about Saeree before this post, but as I see they provide - it's a must following the GPL license. ---------- > "Without playing too much we could get > it work with the Gardenworld data. The > accounting figures are the way we need > it in most countries. But when we > setup our own test client with some > data we still could not fig[code][1] - it's a must following the GPL license.

> "Without playing too much we could get
> it work with the Gardenworld data. The
> accounting figures are the way we need
> it in most countries. But when we
> setup our own test client with some
> data we still could not figure out how
> to configure it correctly"

:-) It seems I'm going to need to translate those manuals. There are lot of interest.

I know configuring LCO withholdings is really hard, and to ease the understanding of this I created a demo site with some preconfigured cases, you can play with GardenWorld+LCO [here][2]

Please excuse us if you find problems with this demo site. Until past week the demo was configured with version 3.4.2s and it was running flawlessly. This week I just migrated it to 3.5.4+patches and I'm still finding some problems and struggling to stabilize it.

> "Is there any reason not to include the
> Colombian Withholding tax solution in
> the trunk"

That's a good question :-) I made a presentation in Berlin past june, and at the end of the presentation the same question arose. The Localization Colombia is being used or considered in Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, Italy, Spain, and now you.

I'm really glad to hear this, and I'm trying to give support on LCO whenever asked in forums (free) or private (paid).

Look, we (GlobalQSS) wrote the LCO withholdings management as an extension with two purposes: 1 - give the extension time to mature proving that it's useful, 2 - to avoid passing initially the trunk process (that is hard to follow when you're writing localizations or some extensions). We needed to answer the needs of Colombia quickly and we could not achieve the needed speed if asking for trunk integration.

Additionally this was intended intially like a localization - and localizations must not go into trunk. The issue is that we did our localization so configurable that it has shown value for many other countries. So, maybe it's the moment to ask if it's worthy to integrate into trunk.

There is an additional thing - there was a similar development called "GTM" (Global Tax Management) that was pushed into trunk without too much discussion and it seems is somewhat incomplete (as it requires additional coding to make it work). My opinion is that both developments (LCO and GTM) are trying to solve the same need in different ways. LCO trying to make it really configurable and user-independent (via configuration rules), and GTM needing additional code to make it work, and AFAIU it needs some user interaction to choose the proper withholdings.

Pushing LCO into trunk will make probably conflict with GTM - Adempiere will have duplicate functionality - personally I don't know if anybody is using GTM. But my guess is that we need to avoid duplicated functionality in trunk. If LCO is considered for integration then we need to a) drop GTM or b) integrate LCO and GTM to use the same structures and approach (what I've tried to analyze but it costs, and I cannot support the effort at this moment)

That's one of the main reasons why I keep pushing this community to establish rules to avoid incomplete things arriving into trunk - and establish rules to encourage competence via extensions.

When an extension is proven to be useful (as it's showing LCO) then it can be voted to be in trunk. Allowing incomplete "first-flag-seeders" in trunk is discouraging competence. I'm not encouraged to code a "better-solution" for "GTM" because it's already in trunk and it's having "competitive advantage" over LCO.

> "Landed Cost does not work as in SAP
> and SAGE Accounting Systems standard"

This is something to improve - I think there are some solutions that are hard to achieve with a pure-community approach - at this moment this community is trying to find better ways to evolve and I hope in future we'll have a complete cost solution (unfortunately I cannot say how much time will take).

> "Is Humanflash the commercial support
> arm of Adempiere or how it works since
> they are very predominant in Google"

Maybe I better would not say this, but honestly I would call HumanFlash some kind of vampires - I've never seen one single contribution from them to Compiere neither Adempiere. Indeed AFAIR Jorg Janke demanded them because they abused the trademark Compiere registering the domain www.mycompiere.com (and JJ won).

They're predominant in Google **ADS** because they pay to be there, I suppose that's OK. What I don't like is the fact they don't contribute back to any of the projects they use to survive.

But please note that maybe I'm just uninformed about.

Regards,

Carlos Ruiz


[1]: http://saeree.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/saeree/
[2]: http://demo.globalqss.com/
4.
globalqssSourceForge.net SubscriberProject Admin

[Avatar]
2009-10-04 18:58:41 GMT
Erratum:

Trifon let me notice that I misread "expensive" when Hassan wrote "extensive".

Regards,

Carlos Ruiz
5.
sureerayaAccepting Donations

[Avatar]
2009-10-09 03:22:36 GMT
Hi All,

I'm Sureeraya. I'm fork project Saeree ERP from Adempiere for Certified with Revenue Department in Thailand. I would like to submit the extended Withholding Tax features to Adempiere too. Please create new branch for me (I can't create with my privilate) . I'm develop base on Adempiere 3.5.3a .

I've planed to retest all process and upgrade to Adempiere 3.5.4a too. Actually Saeree ERP is Adempiere Extended version customize for Thai Accounting Standard. Also included VAT Not Due (for service product in Thailand), Withholding Tax.
6.
globalqssSourceForge.net SubscriberProject Admin

[Avatar]
2009-10-10 16:19:57 GMT
Hi Sureeraya,

> "I would like to submit the extended
> Withholding Tax features to Adempiere
> too. Please create new branch for me
> (I can't create with my privilate)"

I just gave you svn permissions. You can now create your branch and contribute there.

If you want you can add a README.txt file in your branch expressing your preferred branch rules, maintainer, what's in, etc.

Thanks for contributing.

Regards,

Carlos Ruiz
7.
red1Project Admin

[Avatar]
2010-04-09 11:05:12 GMT
I cant find anything from Sureeraya. We now need to pick up on Withholding and Deferred Tax which are in use in Thailand. Carlos, can i use the Withholding Tax of Colombia?

I will ask ISEC whether Withholding Tax is basically when invoicing a vendor, payable value is deducted VAT to be paid to govt later.