I have been suffering for years with an Excel spreadsheet to keep my books in order, my accountant and the tax man happy. So finally I have written my own software to redudce the amount of time I spend on this tedious task to 5 minutes a month. You are welcome to give it a go too.
There are plenty of other free packages out there, but mine runs on Win32/Linux/OS X. It is also a good starting point if you are an IT person wanting to learn about programming, as the source code is also available.
Sorry you are right, I did not qualify the statement enough. I actually meant programming in SWT, object database and JasperReports. This is because SWT is newer than other GUI technologies and there is not as much information on the web as other more established ones like .NET, Swing etc.
I had to dig a lot in order to get the stuff working, and end up migrating completely to it from Quicken and Excel, so it helped me tremendously. If it helps you shorten your development cycle, it is fine, otherwise just ignore it. I am sure you are a very capable programmer and no offence intended.
why write your own? it is faster and cheaper (in time) to buy it off the shelf now days......whay does your own package offer that is not already offered now ??
Correct, this is exactly what I have been doing for the last ten years with Quicken. However, as for any package you get off the shelf, it gets you 90% of the way there for everything you do. The application I wrote gets me the last 10%.
I find on average I have to spend about an hour each month with Quicken and Excel, even though I have all the macros in place to extract data and populate the spreadsheet etc. I'd rather spend that hour sitting in the garden drinking beer in the summer, or watch a new DVD in the winter :-)
Anyway, no matter how cheap the off the shelf application is, it can not be as cheap as mine, as mine is free. Also, you do not have to write your own, as I have been through that pain already so you do not have to.
OK, let's take an example. My financial tax year was determined by the tax man to be from April to April. However, when I set up my own company, Companies House decided that it would be from May to May. Worse than that, the VAT man tells me my VAT quarters will start in June, four times a year. So instead of preparing 3 separate reports each month, these days I click on one button, and then walk to the printer :-)
There are other annoyances too, but let me know if you really want the whole list.
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