ShopChart is a system I developed to help accurately track the costs associated with my restoration efforts. I had previously been using the opentaps implementation of the Apache OFBiz enterprise automation system but its size and complexity obscured the few pieces of information that I'm most interested in and made it time consuming to use.
At a basic level, calculating the cost of a piano is a matter of combining its purchase price with the costs of all of the various parts that are added through the restoration process. In practice though, it's not always a simple matter to find the per-unit cost of some parts and services. When I needed replacement key guide pins, I found them on eBay included with the remains of an otherwise stripped piano but had no way of estimating what percentage its total sale price should be attributed to the individual pins. Among a recent batch of parts I sent to have zinc plated were three harp frames and a set of tone bars. The plater charged a single price for the entire job leaving me to figure out how much should be attributed to each of the parts' three pianos.
In addition to tracking costs, ShopChart also allows me to log labor time. In the past, I've priced my pianos based on a seat-of-the-pants estimate of their value. ShopChart will allow me to calculate a sale price based on the more measurable metric of time invested.
One of ShopChart's strengths is its flexibility. All calculations are done on-the-fly so any information about any Transaction, Assembly or other entity can be changed at any time and the effects will be immediately reflected in all related values, including historic data. This ability to dynamically adapt to changes is also a limitation of ShopChart in its present form. Nearly every action and page load involves extensive database calculations and I don't expect its performance to hold up in an operation with tens of thousands of Persons, Items and Assemblies.
The version of ShopChart running on the Shadetree Keys public website is set up to be read-only. Although all of the user controls appear to be functional, changes to their values will be ignored. Also, private individuals with whom I've done business are shown with generic, anonymous names.
ShopChart is licensed under the GNU General Public License. You are welcome to download and run the program for free. I do not recommend the program for use in a commercial production environment. I've made every effort to ensure that the calculations are accurate and to eliminate bugs in the interface but at this point, the software is still relatively untested. Further, while the various cost calculations are theoretically very accurate, I'm not certain they're practical for use in a real-world business. Also, there is no security implemented in ShopChart. It is a single-user system with no access controls.