If there is one reason I would put down to why I still enjoy coding after all these years, it is the pleasure finding a really challenging problem and being able to solve it quickly and efficiently.

This week saw one of those problems, strange, obtuse, and to most non crazy people would seem to be an odd thing to get excited about. It all started with going through the requirements list on one of our projects.

As I've mentioned before, we are building quite heavily ontop of Xtuple, a Web based GUI using the RooJS Toolkit, most of that part has been just process orientated - add this feature, and it just works. But some of the implementation process has been a challenge.

The company we are working with has 2 main offices (and more comming on line soon), and we have successfully migrated them off of netsuite, which in reality made an absolute mess of their accounts. When migrating to Xtuple (which in essence is a postgresql database, with a seemingly endless number of table triggers, stored procedures and views), we concluded quite early on that setting up a seperate instance for each office would be the best way to go.

Core issues like difference currencies in each office, so the chart of accounts can be reported each year in the local currency to the tax department and auditors, along with the different end-of-year tax reporting made this a simple decission. The otehr issues was that the basic installation of Xtuple does not really support Multiple companies in the Desktop UI (you have to pay for that feature). 

So as we are now live, and just about finished with the rollout issues, we are now on to the more critical things for long term operations - Management reports (and a nice dashboard). 

The issue that raised it's head was that the company needs to see consolidated Balance sheet and Income statements. It did not take to much time to call the internal methods in Xtuple 'financialreport()' and in PHP convert this to JSON so that a master script can call the report in both systems, and merge them together. 

The snag came later when we realized that the resulting report was a little off.. Due to the magic of differeing accounting periods.