On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 02:16:18PM -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > 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.
Here! here! Well spoken Bruce! > 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! I'll include my thanks as well. John's put in many custom features for me, and is thinking ahead. The other recent volunteers assisting with patches and documentation are great too! > 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. I feel your pain! > 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 tried this, and failed. I couldn't get an experienced bookkeeper to understand Ledger, text files, and version control. > 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). Ad-hoc, and cobbled. Applying logic from the outside using text really isn't a good way to do it. > 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. I'm open to sharing, but I'd suggest that my scripts are likely so tightly integrated with my use case they may not be helpful. Perhaps you can learn from them though. > 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. That's the reason I made so many long posts in Feb. I was hoping we can make a real solution together, because at the moment everyone is separately cobbling together one-off tools. Look at how many CSV converters there are... > 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. I was sold on version control and the flexibility. No other product can do splits like I can with Ledger. > 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. I've strongly considered writing a python/sql expense reporting application and be done with it. I just don't care for SQL, I prefer text and version control. John's added some recent support for Python interacting with the Ledger data which I need to go back and look at more closely. > 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? I'd love to help and see some progress. It's always daunting to be trying to fix something, *again*, alone. > 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. So what I hear is: We need a way to build business logic on top of Ledger. Would that be a fair summary of both of our issues? ------------------------------------------------------------------ Russell Adams [email protected] PGP Key ID: 0x1160DCB3 http://www.adamsinfoserv.com/ Fingerprint: 1723 D8CA 4280 1EC9 557F 66E8 1154 E018 1160 DCB3
