I hope this rather long post is appropriate (especially as a first post by a lurker) but I've seen similar posts of this nature in the archives, so I am not too worried.
TL;DR: I run for an non-profit org that depends heavily on Ledger, and I want to work with the community on a project around Ledger to make a "more complete non-profit accounting system" -- with Ledger as the center, including perhaps some ERP-like features, that a "normal accountant" could look at and recognize. If you want to help with that or just talk about it, please read the full message. Full Details: First of all, many on this list know that I'm the Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy ( http://sfconservancy.org ), and at least a few also know the basics of Conservancy's use of Ledger. Conservancy is now facing growing pains with our use of Ledger (which, BTW, is stuck on 2.6.2 for merely tuit reasons). Mainly, I don't have many of the tools Conservancy needs alongside Ledger to really complete what Conservancy needs to serve its projects. Conservancy chose Ledger many years ago because it could do two key things that no Free Software accounting tool could do: (a) it allowed multiple, separate files for Conservancy's various member projects to see their own finances (separately), and (b) Ledger's plain-text format could be stored easily in version control. It's not an exaggeration to say that Ledger 2.6.2 was *the key* piece of infrastructure that allowed Conservancy to grow from our 5-10 member projects in 2007 to nearly thirty now. Indeed, perhaps unbeknown to all of you, the Ledger developers were a key part of what made Conservancy's growth possible, and I give my wholehearted thanks to all of you for this amazing work! For some time, though, Conservancy has had on hold new projects joining (including Ledger *itself*, BTW, which applied some time ago and is still waiting in the join queue :) simply because Conservancy didn't have the bandwidth to accept more projects. Ledger allowed me to run Conservancy as a single-person shop where I do all the accounting myself. But Conservancy's accounting system now doesn't scale for two key reasons: 0. Invoicing, accounts receivable, and receipt and reimbursement tracking have become a time problem, due to volume. The Ledger part of the picture is fast and easy, but these other things "surround" Ledger and it means the bookkeeping is needlessly time-consuming. 1. Our ability to hire a bookkeeper (which I hope to do within a year of now so Conservancy can grow) is hampered because, right now, any bookkeeper Conservancy might hire now *must* be able to edit text files and use version control. (These skills are rarely found in the bookkeeping profession.) I'm aware there are multiple tools (such as hledger-web) floating around our community that are the start of something to solve parts of (1). Meanwhile, I've just this weekend caught up on nearly a year's worth of traffic on this list, I found and read with interest Russell Adams' posts from February 2012 about his system of scripts, which work through some of the things in (0). What Russell is doing is very similar to what Conservancy does (or, at least, wants to do), although Russell now has a lot more automation and more data kept in the Ledger file. Thus, one option for Conservancy is to take Russell's scripts and start adapting them. But, instead, I'd like to propose that the Ledger community think about this problem and perhaps consider what we might do together to develop more tools. I'm not in so much of a hurry to scale with a quick-and-dirty solution. Instead, right along with Conservancy's own mission to improve Free Software for our projects, I'd like to improve the infrastructure around Ledger for everyone in the hopes that a Ledger-based accounting system could be developed and used by non-profits and for-profits alike. There are tons of Free Software ERP and accounting applications. I evaluated nearly every one that existed between 2005-2007 until finally settling on Ledger, and none of them of that era could handle the simple needs of a non-profit operation run by people who prefer to keep documents in version control rather than databases. I doubt anything else can. Of course, I could slam all Conservancy's records out of Ledger into SQL-Ledger or SMBLedger, hire a traditional bookkeeper, and be done with it. But, that would throw away years of work that I've put into setting up Conservancy around Ledger, and I also think a whole other host of problems would come about. So, I'm writing here instead to suggest coming up with a plan to take things to the next step. Does anyone want to work together to tackle this problem? Admittedly, the problem is rather ill-defined at the moment, but the short version is: an accounting system that a non-profit can use to manage its operations based on Ledger. Conservancy is going to do this anyway, and I'd love to have help and make it as generalized as possible. -- -- bkuhn
