Clients and financial years

[Reinhard Müller]

Anybody thought about how to manage these two:

1. Multiple clients (I mean several different companies running a single
installation of gnue)
I see 3 possibilities:
a) A database per client: simplest solution, but several drawbacks:
Tables cannot be shared between clients, data can not (easily) be copied
between clients, current databases systems tend to loose performance
with many active databases and so limit the number of clients.
b) A set of tables per client, with the client number being a part of
the table name (e.g. supply_chain__base__item01): AFAIK some systems go
this way, but I don't know if I like it personally. Not sure about
advantages and disadvantages. Not sure about how many tables may be in a
database.
c) A single set of tables where data of all clients sit, with every
table containing a field with the client id.

Needless to say that I would like gnue to support all three of these :)
Plus I would like geas to manage that for us. But nevertheless I would
be happy to see some discussion on this.

2. Financial years
Some of the accounting packages I know store parts of the accounting
data per financial year. In particular, most of them store the general
ledger per year, some the accounts payable/receivable and the debitors
and creditors, too. (btw: sorry for my horrible business english.
*Please* correct me if I'm using wrong or unclear terms)
I would like a discussion about:
- What data will be stored per year, and what data will be stored
year-independent?
- what possibility out of a), b) and c) from above will we use to divide
the years?
- will geas manage this for us?
- will andrewm travel around half the world to kill me? ;)

Looking forward to another good discussion!

Thanks,
--
Reinhard Müller
BYTEWISE Software GmbH
A-6890 Lustenau, Enga 2
http://www.bytewise.at