How international?

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Steven,

Steven Sackett wrote:
> I think this is a really worthwhile initiative and hope it succeeds.

Thanks for joining the list, and thanks for your kind words!

> the not-for-profit entities will not all have the same requirements.

I agree with you completely that most NPOs have a lot of different needs.  I
think one of the problems we've faced at Conservancy is that in the past when
we evaluated Free Software accounting packages, they made assumptions about
workflow and were less configurable than they seem to be on the surface.

Initially, Conservancy wants to please ourselves and the orgs that endorsed
us -- and do our best to design something that's flexible to help as many other
types of orgs as possible.


BTW, one of the reasons that Ledger CLI has worked so well for Conservancy
(to the extent it does -- doesn't have a GUI or types of interfaces
accountants expect, as discussed in the project plan) is its flexibility.

Ultimately, Ledger CLI is a math library for double entry accounting and
tagging transactions.  My personal bias is that I'd love to find a way to use
Ledger CLI as a "storage engine" for another existing system, but again -- we
want to do the evaluation with as few biases as we can (that's one of the
reason I don't want to do the evaluation personally myself, as I know I'm
biased toward "building something on top of Ledger CLI").

The accounting systems other than Ledger CLI that I've worked with have often
been built in a very "top down" approach -- where they focus on specific
features first and then don't spend as much time designing a flexible base
for double entry accounting.  This is something Ledger CLI got right, and
I'm curious to see if any other system is comparable on that.
--
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy