I am not sure how this will be implemented, but I can see it being very useful to have a system where one could track past expenditure for certain things and have reminders or maybe a progress chart to basically budget for future expenditure.
For example, on my home accounts I have just added the bill for my car service and repairs. Because the bill was so large this year and last year, I put together a spreadsheet where I tracked what I was spending my money on the car each year. It turns out that I need to replace the tyres every 20 000 miles, the brake pads a similar period and brake discs every 40 000 miles etc etc.
In Manager I can put in what I bought each year, how much it cost etc but there is no way to track the mileage per item such as brake pads which could help you identify excessive expenditure as something wrong with the car. There is no option for reminders to state that you are approaching x number of miles and car is due for pollen filter etc etc.
This concept could be used for other things - like printing expenditure. You could track whether any given printer is costing you more than it should, car fleet servicing or you have machinery in your factory and you need to keep on top of when new parts will need to be replaced based on hours used etc.
I don’t expect this feature to be implemented this year, but I am mentioning it now, but it might work well with when you start work on doing charts as I can envision a progress chart being used to track lifespan of products. This may not even be suitable for manager as manager is an accounting program - it can’t be something that does every aspect of finance as this is outside of invoicing/sales aspect.
Just thought that I would put that thought out there as I am sure other people have the same kind of requirement - need to track lifespan of consumables/parts and notifications when replacements are due. Car Sevices would be a classic example of this for home budgeting. Fleet Services and Printing Costs as well as machinery would probably be some business case uses.
The way this is being solved is simply using comparative features in Manager. For example, you could generate comparative P&L month by month or year by year and monitor expenses are not out of line for given period.
If they are, you can look more into that expense account. Possibly when Manager has concept of sub-accounts, you could go as deep as you’d like such as having an expense account for each kind of service for each car. I personally think that would be excessive but if that’s what you want to do, you will be able to.
I have been looking at car expense tracking software and I think it might be better to go with a program like that for what I want to do. What I am looking for would require too much specific implementation for car maintenance that would not be re-usable for other things like printing costs etc. for example fuel economy or mileage recording where you can input the locations of each client and the office and all you have to do is say I went to client a and b today from office - and the program would calculate the mileage. You could get Manger to do this, but I think a program that is dedicated to this might serve better as there is a lot more than just putting in the amounts and using tracker codes.
Although I believe that you mentioned that you were planning on introducing mileage tracking in the future. But thinking about it, you might want to abandon that idea as one program can’t do everything. This is where quickbooks went wrong - they have got far too many features so its really hard to use the program and it doesn’t necessarily do something as well as a dedicated program. so Ya, I think a dedicated program will serve me better in this instance.
HI @lubos, I have gone with this program MileLogik for mileage tracking on the grounds that it uses a hardware logger in the car. Basically you plug the thing into the car and it records every single journey you make. If you press the button, then it marks it as business (if thats what you set the software as), otherwise it records it as personal. Then all you have to do is plug it into your computer once a month and import!
You might want to consider teaming up with this guy (he is also a small company), and you can create the software in Manager for mileage tracking and he can supply the hardware. His program works and does the job perfectly, but is a bit dated looking and he said its not financially viable for him to redo the gui and as most people probably want a mileage tracker within Manager this approach would benefit both of you. A lot of accounting programs allow you to enter the mileage manually - but this is extremely time consuming. This data logger is far better because it records all trips if its plugged into the car and all you have to do is click import and thats it!
In the beginning obviously, you will have to rename the google map co-ordinates to the names of your clients or just rename the ones that you know are personal trips or just delete the personal trips.
I don’t know if this would interest you. As I need a mileage tracking NOW, I am going to go with this program because its perfect for my needs in that I don’t have to waste my time recording mileage readings in the car and then copying the information onto the computer. I think when you do your mileage module, this option would really make your program stand out head and shoulders above the others with regards to mileage tracking as all the others I would imagine expect you to have to do the entries manually which I can tell you is very undesirable and really a legacy way of doing things now. A hardware logger or phone app that you just click start is far better.
Just for reference, these two programs - Automotive Wolf and Vehicle Manager Home 2014 are the kind of programs that I am looking for that will track how much I spend on brakes, tyres etc. As I said in my first post, I was originally thinking that this would be great to have implemented in Manager so I can use this on my personal accounts. However, as I said in my second post, I came to the conclusion that you would have to write modules that are too specific towards car maintenance for example fuel efficiency so you cannot really re-use the modules for plant machinery etc. But if you have a quick at those two programs, you will get an idea of what I was looking for in the way of vehicle Maintenance. I will go for Vehicle Manager because the gui interface is a lot tider than Automotive Wolf.
