Bob, > I was not aware of this. All the nonprofits and small business I know > use QuickBooks. I do not understand accounting systems.
Yes, but QB is a painful fit for NPOs. Actually, it's pretty painful for retail stores too; just try calculating Cost of Goods Sold for a multi-item sale on it. So QB is an example of trying to suit everyone by dramatically restricting functionality. > I think the accounting system should be a separate project --- either > pre-existing or something we embark upon now. Yes. > They didn't abandon the code, they took it proprietary. > http://www.linuxcanada.com/ Ah, similar then. The main point is that we *don't* want to adopt a 3rd-party project which is no longer maintained. That's the worst of both worlds; we have to deal with someone's old cruft, and we get no help from them. > My father uses Quasar for skating club finances and likes it. It's well > featured and stable. I believe he might also use GNU Cash for his > personal finances. Gnucash works fine for personal finances. Again, no one system can suit everyone. > Again, something I know not a lot about. You seem to be well versed in > accounting systems, and I'm interested in learning more. Really... I'm > interested in being told to target a particular system without having to > become myself an expert in accounting. Yeah, I had to take a state college course to support the system I wrote. Not enough to make me an accountant, but enough to understand the language. > I've done it. A client needed specialty accounting (legal trust > > management), existing systems were very painful to adapt, so we wrote > > one from scatch. > > Is it free? (I understand if it's not). It belongs to the client. Also, you wouldn't want it; it's very bent around the needs of environmental torts. And written in Microsoft COM+. > Can you explain what it does not do? I barely even know what QB DOES > do, so this is all a learning curve. The more you can explain about > accounting, the better off I will be. Well, for an umbrella organization I need to be able to do a lot of stuff, incluing: -- Track income and expenses by up to 4 different dates each, including date pledged, check date, date sent, date received and date deposited and date requested, date approved, date sent, date cleared. -- Group income and expenses either by the IRS-approved chart of accounts, or by a completely orthagonal tree of project/sub-project. -- Manage a set of automated, complex per-transaction deductions based on the type of transaction (e.g. Paysimple Visa gift -$0.45 - (gift * 0.02) ), some of which go into asset accounts. -- Manage a system of expense requests which require approval. -- Run ad-hoc queries on the data for anything the canned reports don't cover. > And in that case... maybe we should REALLY keep accounting and NPO > systems separate, so that an org can choose the acounting system that > meets its needs, independent of its needs for marketing, sales, donor > management, etc. Yes. -- --Josh Josh Berkus PostgreSQL San Francisco _______________________________________________ software mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.flossfoundations.org/mailman/listinfo/foundations-software
