LaTeX for business/financial applications

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Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Date: 2001-05-01 12:25:38 PST

: For some time, if been looking for LaTeX packages to do
: business/financial documents, such as invoices, offers, balances etc.
: However, I have never found anything useful in this area. Are there any
: of such packages been written? Where can I find them? Or am I the only
: one using LaTeX in this area?

I am using LaTeX regularly for charging my clients. I made an invoice environment where I

Announce the project to which costs and fees are charged
List my fees as multiples of a unit (day or hour)
List all my expenses in their native currency
Either start a new project to charge, OR
say "Sum" which will print subtotals for all fees, expenses and taxes and will also print a total, as needed.

The package is being used in alpha stage for about one year, I never bothered publishing it. The nice thing is that it does all its calculations automagically, you simply enter once things like base currency and tax rate, and the rest is done by heavy usage of calculation macros.

The system is very fault-tolerant because I designed the sequence of projects, fees, expenses, subtotals and main totals in such a way that whenever a new project is started without preceding subtotal (of the preceding project), then the subtotal is generated first. Kind of a finite state automaton, also in its implementation.

I'll make it "camera-ready" and upload it to CTAN within the next days. Perhaps it is already a starter.

Dr. Oliver Corff