[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Friday 30 December 2005 5:06 pm, Henry Bremridge wrote: > I read this section as allowing me to link my palm contacts, expense and > appointment records for manipulation on a desktop. Correct. > Question > > - If I select Attendees in the expense record, will this also populate > the invoice-city or invoice-vendor fields? Attendees isn't fully supported by pilot-link because it's not a standard field in all Palms. It isn't always accessible via proprietary programs either. Remember, Palm OS is still proprietary - they aren't on Linux yet - which is why I'm also looking at iPAQ's and Familiar/GPE/emDebian. It's the same story with dates of birth. AFAICT, none of the proprietary programs can put Palm data from disparate databases into a single, open, plain text format - like XML. (CSV is a pita and doesn't count!) (I'll make a note in the manpage on attendees, Thanks.) By using categories or the calendar description, yes, you can correlate appointments with expenses and specific clients. That is the express purpose of --invoice-city and --invoice-vendor. Most people will use --invoice-city. e.g. Say I worked for a client from 9am to 1pm and from 2pm to 6pm on Wednesday 2nd November, 2005. I incur a bridge toll, mileage and a daily parking charge. By putting the name of the job (in this case the location of the workplace) in the Description of the appointment and as the Location of the expense, I can query my Palm for that day and get 6 entities returned (this is one of my test cases, so it does work): $ pilot-qof -a -t 2005-11-2 --invoice-city 3 Expense events - toll, mileage and parking. 2 Calendar events - the 4 hrs in the morning and 4 in the afternoon. 1 Contact record - the full contact details for that job. Hey presto, with a little XSL or Perl or PHP, you can generate your own invoice in HTML or whatever you fancy. Your own graphics, your own logos, fonts, styles, layout . . . Best thing is, of course, that the XML structure stays the same - only the data changes for each subsequent query. So the same stylesheet or script can always process all your queries with no changes. Create as many stylesheets or scripts as you need, they'll just keep on working. Data Freedom. That's the name of the game. Next stage is to sort out the glitches to allow me to import that XML directly into GnuCash as an invoice for the client using that location as the Job ID. Create a new Job and a new client, if necessary, too. > - Would this program allow me to extract a list of all appointments with > a particular person / company with the date of each appointment? The way to do this is to specify some "tag" in the Description field, or use a particular Category. So yes, if you are logical and *consistent* about how you enter your Palm data, a host of data mining opportunities become available. Just like any other record system, the more consistent you are in data entry, the better the results you'll get out. The date range can be extended to a whole month or an entire year using the shorthand options. Using the longer SQL-type queries, you can have completely arbitrary queries that go from a Sunday to a Friday or even split days etc. It just takes a little care in the SQL. In addition, the same query would be able to list all expenses incurred during your appointments with that client / person. The rest of the program options can then do a range of other things like: 1. Separate your appointments into files, one per category - allowing a script to calculate the number of days you've worked and how many you've had as holiday - including totting up the number of hours if necessary. 2. Organise your expenses by payment type, expense type, or amount. 3. Separate out your mileage records within a certain time frame to produce a reliable measure of business mileage during any time period. Compare that with your odometer for the same time period and you've got your business:private usage ratio for your tax return. 4. Correlate your ToDo lists with your calendar to see when you got the most things done. Plus, you can select records from one Palm device and upload just those to another device. There's more to be done in this area but it's coming along. > - In the invoice section: para 1 > > If both are supplied, I presume this means if both invoice-city and > invoice-vendor are selected then the search is only on invoice-city Yes. Logically, the vendor of an expense should have little to do with the client being charged for the item purchased. However, in practice, I find the Vendor field next to useless and what I need is a Client field - so I use Vendor as if it was Client. Hence the allowance to use vendor in this way. Equally, City in terms of an expense is just as easily termed 'Location' which is far more flexible as it allows differentiation between expenses incurred during work for multiple clients in the same city. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
Attachment:
pgpfzVTPZjfNf.pgp
Description: PGP signature