BANGALORE, INDIA: There's an old perception that Open Source ERP solutions are rather complex and difficult to use. And with good reasons. But SQL-Ledger is different. It is intuitive, easy to use and provides you impressive capabilities so you can do business-class double-entry book keeping.

Last month, we showed how to install and get started with SQL-Ledger. This month we use it for a small business scenario so that its features can be put to test. We had successfully installed SQL-Ledger on Apache server and also configured user roles for PostgreSQL database, used by the software for storing information. We had stopped at the point where the dataset for a company's accounts was created. Now we continue from that step and associate a demo company to the dataset.

Setting up the dataset and the user
After successful login from the Administration screen, you land up on the SQL-Ledger Accounting Administration page. To create or configure the dataset, click on Pg Database Administration button. On the next screen, provide the Host as localhost and the port as 5432, and then click on 'Create Dataset'.

The screen that follows is where we name the dataset and also associate the dataset with a Chart of Accounts. For our demo, we have named the dataset as 'pcqdemo' and chosen the default chart of accounts as the accounting system. A Chart of Account is an accounts template for various businesses and also represents the accounting regulations of various countries, including US, UK, Austria, Australia and Canada.

Getting started
When you log on to SQL-Ledger as a user, you will be presented with an interface that houses two frames. The left frame has the navigation menu, which can expand to further categories and sub-menus. The right pane is the screen for data entry.

For a small business, opening up the accounts balance will require entering the details of customers, vendors/suppliers, goods or services descriptions and taxation details. We started the opening balance for our demo company by entering details customers that our company has, and also of the vendor who supplies products.

The customer details can be entered through AR > Customers > Add Customer from the left navigation pane. The data fields in the 'Add Customer' pane ask for various details of the customer, and even allow us to set the credit threshold limit and also associate a salesperson to a particular customer. Similarly vendor details can be entered through AP > Vendors > Add Vendor from the navigation menu. The data fields are similar to those for customers but here we can delegate an employee to a vendor.