The end of the accounting search

Posted May 6, 2023 0:15 UTC (Sat) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446)
Parent article: The end of the accounting search

My little company in the UK (South Somerset) used to run accounts on Sage. We started out with spreadsheets (2000) and fell into the classic trap of "what is everyone else using?" when we got to the point that we needed to grow up.

Sage is a UK firm (tick) but what an absolute bunch of wankers. Perhaps I should explain. Me and my boys and girls (etc) have roughly 20 concurrent years experience with Sage. Whenever there is a problem then you will have your network diagnosed as being at fault. Then your AV and so on and so forth. Little Sage is based on text files. Bigger more (very) expensive Sage is a proper DBMS based thing. They could have used MySQL for little Sage or both but ... profits - fuck off customers! They now have a weird Windows service based thing for little Sage that seems to manage file locking. That is sadly the way of things sometimes. We still have loads of happy Sage customers on our books but that's their bag, until the wheels fall off for some reason, then we get to debate network stability.

Anyway. We took on a customer from Bridgwater - a manufacturing firm, around 2014. Their MD was an accountant in a former life and he and his IT bod had created a thing they called UzERP - basically an ERP system written in PHP with a PostgreSQL backend from scratch. Several more companies ended up using it and we migrated to it in roughly 2016. We retain a programmer to look after it.

I remember the old days of wanting to run a report and having to get someone to logout so I could use their Sage licence. Nowadays, I either use the rather weird webby front end or dive in with pgsql or even R.

As big Jon alluded to in the article (and for many past years), an accounting system is a bit of a pain when you want to actually own your stuff. I've had a poke at GNUCash and it looks jolly capable but we are all in on UzERP. I'm still not too sure why because I am nearly the only member of the firm that actually uses Linux all the time (Arch, actually) and I never got really involved in the accounting stuff too much. Then again, why should I - I'm the MD 8)

The end of the accounting search

Posted May 11, 2023 10:49 UTC (Thu) by nowster (subscriber, #67) [Link] (1 responses)

In the big UK VAT change of 2008 (from 17.5% to 15%), we had a lot of recurring (stored) invoices in Sage Line 50. You could change the default VAT rate for newly created invoices, but not for stored ones. Sage themselves were no help. I had to reverse engineer the binary file format to patch the values.

It was then that I found they were storing money amounts using 32 bit (single precision) floats, with the base unit being a whole GBP, contrary to decades of good accounting practice in avoiding rounding errors. (You can't represent £0.01 exactly in binary IEEE 754 formats.)

The end of the accounting search

Posted May 11, 2023 17:07 UTC (Thu) by cwitty (guest, #4600) [Link]

That's scary. Representing money with (binary) floating point is pretty bad, but using single-precision floating point is amazingly bad. That can't even represent £16,777,217; you'd have to use a value that was off by one GBP (either up or down). And if you don't want to gain or lose as much as £0.01 in accounting error, you'd need to restrict yourself to numbers much less than a million.