On Wed, May 07, 2014 at 07:24:25PM -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > 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.
+1 > 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. I've had the same problem trying to find help to maintain my ledgers. > > 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/ I started tinkering on a tool last year called TERT duplicating very basic Ledger functions in SQL in Python, and it fell apart at the UI layer. I'd be happy to contribute any of that code if you can reuse it. > 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 findings were similar, and I went as far as evaluating commercial tools with a bias toward hosted (web) solutions for my specific use case (project expense reporting). There's no tool like Ledger. > 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 You might also refer back to my series of posts on scaling Ledger from a while back. My concerns are still present though John has done an excellent job of introducing new items to help with validation. I think the key is we lack a user interface. Most users don't grok editing a text file and running reports. I know one of Ledger's core ideas is that it is text based and doesn't change the data, but for an API I suspect eventually a database will be required for concurrent users and validation. To that end, I think it would be amazing to see Ledger extended to a database with export/import functions between formats. I look forward to what progress you are able to make! Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Russell Adams [email protected] PGP Key ID: 0x1160DCB3 http://www.adamsinfoserv.com/ Fingerprint: 1723 D8CA 4280 1EC9 557F 66E8 1154 E018 1160 DCB3 -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
