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82 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
82 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
/** \page business1 Business Overview
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API: \ref Business
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\section businessoverview Business Objects
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The GnuCash Business objects, in src/business/business-core, implement
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certain basic small-business accounting functions. Below follows a summary
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overview of the objects and the data that they store. These are listed in
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order of complexity; with the basic building blocks first, and the more
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complex structures last.
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\subsection address Address:
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A very simple object, stores strings for name/street-address/phone/fax/email
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The address is not a separate entity, but is meant to be embedded in other
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objects (that is, there is no addressbook; there is no address database that
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is separate from the objects that use addresses; there is no 'foreach'
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that can be used to iterate over all addresses.)
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API: \ref Address
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\subsection billterm BillTerm:
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Describes billing terms, that is when a bill is due, and what sort of a
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discount is applied (if any). The BillTerm object currently supports:
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-- the discount applied to a bill (absolute numeric value),
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-- the number of days until payment is due,
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-- the number of days until a discount expires.
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-- cutoff ??
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The proximo type does what ???
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API: \ref BillTerm
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\subsection entry Entry:
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\subsection invoice Invoice:
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Pulls together info needed to generate an invoice, including addresses,
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job, the dates, the billing terms, the amounts, and the accounts
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to be credited.
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API: \ref Entry
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\section bus_design Business Design & Implementation Notes
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Derek Atkins <warlord@mit.edu>
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Version of October 2003
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The gncTaxTable and gncBillTerm business objects have parent, child,
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refcount, invisible field in their structures that deserve some
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explanation:
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- a child is a 'frozen' instance of a parent. For example, the tax
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percentage in a particular tax table may change over time, but you
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dont want that change to affect already-posted invoices... So you
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make sure there is an immutable 'copy' (read: child) of the tax
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table when you post the invoice and repoint at the child.
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- a parent can have many children, but it will only have a 'child'
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pointer if the parent has not been modified. Think of this as a
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copy-on-write mechanism. posted invoices will continue to use the
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_same_ child until the parent is modified, at which point a new
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child will be created.
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- invisible means "dont show this in the list". It's so you dont
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get all the children in the tax table list -- you only see parents.
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I suppose this flag could also be called "is-child" as I believe that
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only children can be invisible, and ALL children are invisible.
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- refcount is a listing of how many objects are referencing it.
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Basically, it's letting you know how many customer, vendor, entries,
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etc are referencing e.g. a particular tax table object. mostly this
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was done to make sure you cannot delete an in-use taxtable.
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- children don't use refcounts, only parents do.
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- A child always points to its parent (it can have only 1).
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- A parent has a list of all children.
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- A parent has a pointer to the current 'replica child', if one exists.
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*/
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------------------------- end of file ------------------------------
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