I realized that while I've frequently discussed Conservancy's NPO
Accounting Software Project on the IRC channel, I hadn't mentioned it
here on the list. I'd like to briefly tell you all about it, and invite
those of you who are interested in it to the NPO Accounting mailing
list. Details are at: http://npoacct.sfconservancy.org/
Brief background: Conservancy has used Ledger-CLI since around mid-2008.
We currently have 137,677 lines of ASCII Ledger-CLI data. We're thus
likely the largest Ledger data set in real-world operations.
Conservancy switched to Ledger-CLI simply because it was the only Free
Software accounting tool that had the flexibility to handle the complex
area of non-profit accounting called "fiscal sponsorship", which is the
primary purpose of our organization.
However, the fact is: I keep the books myself because Ledger-CLI gives
you an excellent set of books -- but one that only a hacker could love.
That said, our accountants (after a few annual audits that were painful)
this year absolutely loved our reporting and found our annual audit a
breeze (see the contrib/ area of Ledger-CLI's repository for the scripts
we use for reporting). Our chief auditor even said to me: "You make a
pretty good accountant for a software developer; let me know if you want
to go for a career change". Frankly, the key thing that made me look
good was Ledger-CLI and its flexibility and simplicity of design.
However, Conservancy's biggest challenge now is that we are growing and,
when look to handing off book-keeping to someone else, we'd need a
programmer who can use Emacs, the command line, and revision control
systems. Requiring a programmer to do the bookkeeper job doesn't scale.
We need a better UI for both data entry and reporting to make this work.
However, I'd hate to lose the flexibility that Ledger-CLI has given us.
As such, Conservancy last year started raising funds to build a better
accounting system for non-profit organizations on top of ledger:
https://sfconservancy.org/campaign/
We nevertheless didn't automatically assume Ledger-CLI was the right
system to build on. It was my admittedly my hypothesis, but we tried to
test that hypothesis first. We surveyed of all the known Open Source
and Free Software accounting applications, and frankly we found them all
lacking for various reasons. Either (a) they try to do too much and
fail to get the accounting done right, or (b) they are just poorly
designed. Our survey results are collected at:
http://npoacct.sfconservancy.org/ExistingProjects/
My conclusion was that the next step is to create an API that uses
Ledger-CLI on the back-end. Work began on that already (thanks to a
contractor who worked with us, Joar Wandborg), and the results of that
work is here: https://gitorious.org/conservancy/accounting-api
Further development is currently slow-going. However, I recently
announced that I'll be spending 50% of my time on the project, and
Conservancy hopes that we'll get more donations as time goes on and the
project becomes "actually useful" instead of just "proof of concept".
We're focused on what non-profit orgs need first, but long-term, we'd
like to build an accounting application that will "last". Accounting
systems may be the most re-implemented things in the world, especially
when you consider it was among the first things anyone used a computer
to do (COBOL was invented for this purpose, after all!). My view is: we
need to do this right, not fast. Ledger-CLI is the right first step in
this regard.
I therefore welcome you all to the NPO Accounting mailing list:
http://lists.sfconservancy.org/mailman/listinfo/npo-accounting
and to our IRC channel, #npoacct on freenode.
However, I will be cross-posting (as I did today) any messages that are
Ledger-CLI-specific. So if you are interested only in what we're doing
as it relates specifically to Ledger, no need to take action.
--
Bradley M. Kuhn, President, Software Freedom Conservancy
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