[software] NPO software: where we need to go

[Bob F]

I have so far been reluctant to do much with financials in OA because  
accounting software is its own ball of wax.

But I have done some.  Each person (record) stored in the OA database  
has available a number (5 for now, it's easily expanded) of double- 
entry multi-currency general ledgers.  A few ledgers does not an  
accounting system make, but at least it stores the basic data needed  
for such system.  Even with this rudimentary system, I'm able to do  
some good things like:
  *) Maintain accounts for open class credit (think like NYC's  
MetroCard).
  *) Calculate tuition for the school, bill parents, and track their  
payments.
  *) Record outstanding pledges and their payments.
  *) Sell tickets

More specifics on managing the donations account:
  1) When you pledge, your account is debited.
  2) When you pay the pledge, your account is credited.
  3) People with negative outstanding balances in their donations  
account still have unfilled pledges.

My approach to making the financials work was to import/export with a  
real accounting system, rather than writing a new accounting system  
inside of OA.  I have not done so yet because I do not know enough  
about accounting, and I haven't found someone yet who does and is  
able to bridge the knowledge gap to OA's core functionality (i.e. I  
need some guidance here from a software-savvy accountant).

Currently, the practice I've observed is the same as what Dave  
mentioned --- an accounting side of the nonprofit duplicates some of  
the organizational database's data in the accounting system.   
Definitely not ideal.  With good automated ways to share data between  
the accounting and organizational systems, this could be eliminated.

It seems that we really need a good free software general purpose  
accounting system, and then we can integrate our donor management  
systems with it in a very tight manner (i.e. by sharing the  
database), rather than less tight manners (export/import files or  
manual dual data entry).  Possibilities:

*) GNU Cash --- I believe they're moving to a client/server model,  
which would be perfect for this kind of integration.  The donor  
management system could read and write directly in the GNU Cash  
database, based on a common understanding of the schema.

*) Quasar --- This was formerly released under GPL, but no longer.  I  
have access to a GPL version of the code, which I believe would be  
perfectly legal for us to fork.  It's a very significant program,  
written in C++/Qt I believe.  The company in general has been moving  
toward point of sale systems.

This kind of integration of a general accounting system with a system  
specific to an organization's needs is actually how things worked in  
my work on Wall St. as well.  We never built accounting systems, we  
just integrated with them by reading/writing directly into their  
database.  I am skeptical of Donor.com's proposal to build their own  
accounting system because I've never seen it be done.

The other problem with accounting in nonprofits is that many  
nonprofits are bound by what software their auditors are willing to  
use.  And that means QuickBooks.  I believe that getting nonprofits  
to use free accounting software will be a huge challenge for this  
reason alone.  Although I would absolutely love to have an all-free  
accounting solution I can work with, I will probably be forced to  
integrate with QuickBooks simply to get many organizations to use  
it.  This is like the way that we are forced to make our software run  
on Windows for the same reason :-(.

Summary: I think our free software resources would be best spent  
building up a general purpose accounting system based on client- 
server database technology (two or three tier, doesn't matter).   
Nonprofit management software can then integrate with that system by  
connecting to its database and moving transactions in and out.

-- Bob


On Oct 27, 2008, at 1:43 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:

> All,
>
>  From looking at Civi, Rapport, Donor.com, and OA, I see that there  
> are
> currently multiple mature options for handling the "Front side"  
> part of
> donor management.
>
> However, what apparently currently doesn't exist is the financials,
> particularly financials which would accomodate complex arrangements  
> like
> fund accounting.
>
> Donor.com proposes to work on their financials module if they can get
> funding.  I think that some of us externally should do parallel  
> work at
> the same time on a financials module which is designed from the get-go
> to be "plugged in", that is, to accept a stream of transactions  
> from any
> of several Donor/campaign managment software packages.
>
> Yes/no?
>
> --Josh
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> software at lists.flossfoundations.org
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> software

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