Overview

Free Net Billing provides Accounts Receivable and Inventory functions for small businesses. This page is designed to give you an understanding of the assumptions and choices made in the design of the system, hopefully allowing you to determine whether the system meets your requirements without wasting much of your time.

Current Period
Tracking of all information is done on a monthly basis. All activity is done in a specific Accounting Period (e.g. May 2005). Once all activity for the period has been recorded, the period is manually ended and the Current Accounting Period is advanced to the next calendar month. The End of Month procedure does NOT have to occur on the last day of the month. After a period has been closed, the activity for that period can still be accessed for the purpose of reporting, but no further transactions can be recorded for that period. This is in contrast to some systems that will allow posting in a less disciplined way.

Audit Trail
Once posted, transactions cannot be deleted, they can only be reversed. This provides an easy to follow audit trail, but again, stands in contrast to some other systems.

Accounts Receivable
The Accounts Receivable function is a Balance Forward system. A Customer statement for the current month begins with the Balance at the end of the last month and shows all activity during the current month. An Historical Statement showing activity for all months is also provided.

Inventory
The Inventory function uses a Perpetual Moving Weighted Average Cost method of inventory valuation. Any inventory gain or loss (due to manual changes to the On Hand Quantity or Average Cost) is tracked and reported by the system.

The Inventory system allows entry of purchases by specific Vendors but is not an Accounts Payable system.

Logins-Users-Passwords
An installation of Free Net Billing can support any number of different companies. Each company is referred to as a separate Login, with each company having a different login Account name, which is entered in the first line of the Login box, along with a password which is entered in the second line. Each Login allows 26 different, simultaneous users, distinguished by a single letter designation (A-Z), with each user having a unique password. The user code of the person posting any transaction is recorded. User -A- is the master user and can perform any function. Other users (B-Z) can be assigned one of 4 different levels of functionality that can restrict users to the functions appropriate to their job:

  • -I- Invoice (Create/Reprint Invoice, Customer statements)
  • -P- Posting (Level I + All Posting, Add and Edit)
  • -R- Reports (Level P + All Report Printing)
  • -S- System (Level R + All System Functions - except passwords)

Data Retention Period
The Data Retention Period is 3 years by default and can be extended. At the end of each month, transactions that are older than the Data Retention Period are deleted, along with any Inactive Customer/Client, Item, and Vendor records that have no transaction history or balance.

System Capacity
There are no arbitrary limits to the number of Inventory Items or Customer/Clients that can be accommodated (SQLite has a 2 terabytes total data file size limit). Increasing the number of items and accounts in an installation will tend to slow the loading and operation of the system to some extent. Defining the practical limits of the system depends on :

  • The speed and reliability of the network involved
  • The robustness of the client side operating system and web browser, and their ability to handle larger amounts of data.

The system has been tested with :

  • 500 client accounts
  • 5,000 inventory items
  • Broadband SSL Internet Connection.
  • 256 Megabyte 500 Megahertz Windows 98 client

Performance on the above system was more than adequate. Reliability was fine, though not thoroughly tested. The system has been tested with smaller data sets for extended periods, with excellent reliability.

Point of Sale Equipment
Support is provided for Ticket Printers, Bar Code Scanning and Bar Code Printing.

By default all printing occurs on the default system printer, and Invoices (sales tickets) are configured for letter size paper. The system is easily configured to print Invoices on a 40 column Ticket Printer. Currently this is only practical when using a Windows based client system. The system has been tested with an Epson TM-U220 printer, but should work with other printers.

Bar Code Scanning works on Windows and BSD/Linux systems.

Bar Code Printing is only practical when using a Windows based client system. Currently the only supported Bar Code Label printer brand is Cognitive. Both 1" (part # 03-02-1520) and 2" (part # 03-02-1519) label formats are supported.

Change Log

  • Version 1.0 1/1/2005
  • Version 1.1 5/1/2006
  • Converted Inventory From Last Cost to Average Cost System
  • Added Sales Tax Jurisdictions
  • Version 1.1a 8/15/2006
  • Fixed problem with selection of Current Period at startup
  • Fixed date/transaction number problem in History For Selected Item
  • Version 1.1b 9/16/2006
  • Fixed date problem in Close Period
  • Version 1.1c 12/30/2006
  • Improved Email procedure
  • Version 1.1d 3/7/2007
  • Fixed Backspace reload problem
  • Version 1.1e 7/8/2007
  • Fixed Problem in Leap Year Dates
  • Version 2.0 3/7/2010
  • Revision of Invoice, Accounts Receivable, Purchase and Inventory screens