[software] NPO software: where we need to go

[Dave Rolsky]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2008, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:

> Dave Rolsky wrote at 13:50 (EDT) on Monday:
>
>> Isn't accounting better handled by accounting software. My animal
>> rights organization uses Gnucash for our accounting, which works
>> well. This does mean that donations ultimately get recorded in two
>> places, but in different ways, since we don't track individual
>> donations in Gnucash, just Rapport (the original).
>
> Yeah, this duplication of work is the exact problem we're trying to
> avoid.  I agree that the software packages should be separate, but we
> need strong integration.

I'm not sure what this integration would look like.

When we enter donations in Gnucash, we enter them as a lump sum ($1,000) 
as a tranfer from Income:donations to Bank:checking.

In Rapport, we store each donation separately, so that $1,000 is broken 
down into many donations.

I definitely don't want to track each donation separately in Gnucash. That 
really doesn't help with anything, and makes our accounts much more 
confusing.

What might be nice is a way to associate each donation in Rapport with 
some sort of "deposit id" or Gnucash record transaction id, so that for a 
given donation in Rapport, we can find it's corresponding (lumped 
together) transaction in Gnucash.

Adding such a field is obviously trivial. Automating any sort of 
connection between the two things is obviously much more complicated, and 
that's where I get stuck.


-dave

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