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On Fri, Dec 30, 2005 at 06:16:58PM +0000, Neil Williams wrote: > 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. > Nice. I need to start thinking about how to make use of this program. When is it being released? > 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. >
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