[software] Design Decisions

[Dave Rolsky]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008, Jim Brandt wrote:

>> In Rapport, users _are_ contacts (just like CiviCRM), so a user can be a
>> donor, yes. I'm not sure how "in charge" of donations would work. Since
>> I'm not planning on building an accounting system, this seems out of
>> scope. Rapport would have no concept of who is in charge of some money, it
>> can just tell you that you got donations from some contacts towards some
>> fund.
>
> Maybe this is obvious, but without accounting integration, how can you 
> confirm for a donor that the money was spent on the target they intended? Is 
> there a separate account in the accounting software for each fund, or is the 
> donation flagged as it passes into the accounting package? However, if 
> accounting transactions are aggregated, as I think you said before, can you 
> tell a donor for sure that their donation went to what they intended?

>From my reading of Josh's message, this is not an accounting _integration_ 
issue, but rather simply one of accounting.

The accounting system needs to support splitting a single transaction 
across multiple logical accounts. Gnucash supports this (sort of), but 
AFAIK only on one "side" of the transaction (so a single deposit can come 
from multiple income sources, but you can't have a many-to-many type of 
split). Presumably you'd need accounting software that did support this 
many-to-many type of mapping to really do this properly.

Ultimately, if your goal is to ensure that you can assure donors that 
their money is being allocated as specified, that can be done entirely 
through accounting.

Is that really a need, though? My experience has been that most donors 
trust you to do what they ask, and I've _never_ had a donor come back to 
us later asking for a report on where their money went. We do produce an 
annual report with a broad overview of expenses and income, though 
(*cough* TPF needs to this *COUGH!*).

This is a little different for grants, where the granting foundation often 
asks for a report, but this is pretty easy, since at least in my case, our 
grants are almost always for a single well-defined event, so we can simply 
include a budget for the event as part of the post-event report.

Of course, ideally this would be tied into your CRM as well so you could 
get intelligence of what projects each donor supports. Of course, this 
could also be recorded separately, by allowing the CRM to split a single 
donation across multiple funds.

Again, I really don't want to go _too_ far down this road for Rapport. If 
the ultimate solution is an integrated accounting & CRM package, that's 
not in the cards for Rapport (at least not in the next couple years).

If a partial implementation is useful, that might be possible, but from 
Josh's description, I suspect it's not.


-dave

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