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I have so far been reluctant to do much with financials in OA because accounting software is its own ball of wax.<div><br><div>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:</div><div> *) Maintain accounts for open class credit (think like NYC's MetroCard).</div><div> *) Calculate tuition for the school, bill parents, and track their payments.</div><div> *) Record outstanding pledges and their payments.</div><div> *) Sell tickets</div><div><br></div><div>More specifics on managing the donations account:</div><div> 1) When you pledge, your account is debited.</div><div> 2) When you pay the pledge, your account is credited.</div><div> 3) People with negative outstanding balances in their donations account still have unfilled pledges.</div><div><br></div><div>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).</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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:</div><div><br></div><div>*) 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.</div><div><br></div><div>*) 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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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 :-(.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Summary:</b> 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.</div><div><br></div><div>-- Bob</div><div><br></div><div><br><div><div>On Oct 27, 2008, at 1:43 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">All,</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>From looking at Civi, Rapport, Donor.com, and OA, I see that there are<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">currently multiple mature options for handling the "Front side" part of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">donor management.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">However, what apparently currently doesn't exist is the financials,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">particularly financials which would accomodate complex arrangements like<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">fund accounting.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Donor.com proposes to work on their financials module if they can get<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">funding.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I think that some of us externally should do parallel work at<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">the same time on a financials module which is designed from the get-go<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">to be "plugged in", that is, to accept a stream of transactions from any<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">of several Donor/campaign managment software packages.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Yes/no?</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">--Josh</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">_______________________________________________</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">software mailing list</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:software@lists.flossfoundations.org">software@lists.flossfoundations.org</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="http://lists.flossfoundations.org/mailman/listinfo/foundations-software">http://lists.flossfoundations.org/mailman/listinfo/foundations-software</a></div> </blockquote></div><br></div></div></body></html>