OpenPetra as existing accounting package for charities

[Timotheus Pokorra]

Hello all,

first of all let me say that I am glad that this list has started.
When the FSF launched the search for a a donation management system, I
was sad that only a good CRM solution was found (CiviCRM), but without
accounting capabilities.

Allow me to point you to this project that I have worked on for the
past years, with various colleagues:
http://www.openpetra.org

It is Open Source, licensed under GPL3, written in C#, but has always
been tested to run on Mono as well, besides Microsoft.Net.
The code is at Launchpad, and mirrored on Github:
https://code.launchpad.net/openpetraorg
https://github.com/tpokorra/openpetragit/
It mainly supports Postgresql and SQLite, Mysql is supported as well.

The predecessor of OpenPetra, called Petra, has been in use by OM, the
organisation that I work for, since 1997, in more than 100 countries
around the world.
OpenPetra is a rewrite of Petra, different language, but more or less
same data structure, and using all the experience from Petra.
On the one hand, the financial structure reflected by the database
structure might be quite specific to our organisation. On the other
hand, it has to answer many different situations in different
countries. And it is specifically designed to move money around the
world, in all directions and currencies.
It was designed to be very easy to use, since our bookkeepers are
sometimes untrained people, with high staff turn-over (volunteer
workers).

You might want to have a look at the database structure:
for accounts:
http://openpetraorg.sourceforge.net/dbdoc/index.html?table=a_ledger&group=account
for donations:
http://openpetraorg.sourceforge.net/dbdoc/index.html?table=a_gift&group=gift

We have a sample database with donors and accounts of one year,
randomly generated, available at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/openpetraorg/files/openpetraorg/demodata/

There is a version available for download, at the moment only for
Windows, but I can build a installer for Linux too, if that is of use.
At the moment, it is still in Alpha stage.
I am using OpenPetra for one small german charity for printing annual
donation receipts, and manage the addresses and accounts each month.
We are also using OpenPetra for matching donations coming in via
standing order, to help the staff in the german OM office. The data is
then imported into the old Petra.

I want to know what the general needs of NPOs around the world are, so
it is good to collect the needs in one place.
I also think a scope needs to be set, otherwise a project never
becomes ready for production.
That is a weak point of OpenPetra: a lot of man years has gone into
the project, but we have not been able yet to roll it out across our
own organisation, not to even think about other organisations.

I want to make clear that I don't mind which project comes out as the
"winner", I just hope one or two projects will make it and take off. I
don't want charities to spend huge amounts of money on software that
does not really fit their needs, and the investment does not help
other organisations.

I am happy to contribute knowledge and experience on a wiki, or demo
data, or help with setting up build servers etc

Have a good weekend,
  Timotheus