>Does anybody have any knowledge or experience with interfacing Foxpro with Peachtree accounting package? Actually, any feature-rich, Windows-based, simple-to-use, multi-user, CHEAP, and most importantly, Foxpro interfaceable off-the-shelf accounting package will do nicely. Yes, I know I'm asking a lot, especially with the word "CHEAP" in there.
>
>I've tried to build a simple accounting package myself for my smaller clients that have special needs most off-the-shelf packages don't provide but found it too time-consuming to actually finish one. All of the customizable Foxpro-based accounting packages are too expensive, even w/o source for some very small clients that I have. Anyway, most don't need "100 page feature list package" and can get by with just the basics but always have one or two aspects of accounting they want to customize.
>
>The reason I brought up Peachtree is that it fits all aspects of what I want except I don't know how hard it is to interface with a Foxpro-based application and data.
>
>TIA
>John.


It is my understanding that Peachtree uses Btrieve for its
data access methods. It would be interesting to see how
hard it would be to use a product like DBFtrieve (which
allows you to directly read/write btrieve files from your
foxpro application)to interface a custom billing process
onto a Peachtree application.

It is my experience that functions like payroll, accounts
payable, and G/L are pretty much similar from company to
company; but billing/AR functions can vary greatly.

You would need some sort of technical documentation from
Peachtree explaining their data structures(which I'm sure
is not available). An alternative would be to look at the
data files before and after certain transactions and backward
engineer the data update process so that you can write programs
which update the Peachtree data files appropriately.

Let me know if you hear of anyone doing this because I would
be very interested in collaborating in such an effort.