Python for Asset Management!

[achrist at easystreet.com]

There is a fairly lame asset management demo that comes or came with
MS Office, written in Access, IIRC.  You might start with that and
convert it to python.

Having written a fairly big asset-management package myself, IDK why
anyone would really want to do this.  You can find various shareware 
packages starting about $15 and up.  Good commercial packages, like
mine, can be had for around $1,000 and up.  (My product is targeted
at a specific niche, so I am not in any way suggesting that it is
what you need.)

Meanwhile, MS has acquired some companies that do accounting packages
and offers some complete accounting packages that include fixed assets
for around $5,000 IIRC.  They have been trying to offer some nearly-
complete packages for around $1,500 that have not included fixed
assets, but that might change at their whim, depending.  It's very
hard to compete with MS when the user has MS all over their desktop, 
and that's almost everyone for such markets. All of these numbers I
throw about casually are trivial compared to the costs of writing
anything good.

The accounting aspects can be the most interesting to program and there
are some complexities that might make good use of the highly-dynamic
nature of python.  For example, most of the full-featured systems
facilitate setting up multiple sets of books covering the same
set of assets (for example, depreciation is different on the tax 
return from depreciation reported to shareholders).  With multiple
sets of books, multiple accounting rules, schedules, rates, and
policies, something like AOP might be a way to keep all the different
considerations from tangling things up beyond belief.

It's the old software designer problem of how to do something
without doing anything, no matter how dumb.

My goal in developing my fixed assets software was to be able to give
the user a program with a desktop look-and-feel that would be able to
do batch processing of up to 50,000 asseets without more than a minute
or two wait, and thus we didn't use Python.  However, I have found
python to be very useful for helping convert customer data from other
systems into mine.

alc at publicpropertysoftware.com


Mike wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> Im working on some research for a asset management system. We will use
> python as our primary platform. As a opensource programmer the obvious
> question is; are there any opensource systems available?
> 
> I found an article about ilm's system (story from python.org), sounds
> very interesting. Im looking for more information about similar
> systems (of course python based!), all feedback is welcome!
> 
> I hope there's someone outthere who knows some more about this!
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> -- Mike