A couple of questions regarding goals for the project

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Chris Travers wrote at 21:29 (EDT) on Tuesday:

> 1:  To what extent is the goal of the project to create an open source
> system which other free/open source accounting software communities
> can learn from and implement?  I.e. to what extent is a goal of the
> project to help facilitate better NPO support generally?

I am not completely sure I understand this question.  I am going to try
to restate it slightly, and then answer that question, but if I've
misunderstood, please do correct me.  I think you might be asking:

  "To what extent does this project seek to just build a list of
   requirements, which could be used by any accounting software project
   to implement?"

I think that isn't really much of the goal, but I agree that would be a
useful side-effect if it happens.  Our primary goal is to just get
something that works for many NPOs (see below), starting from some known
codebase that gives us a path of least resistance there.

Frankly, I thought very much about simply deciding up-front to use
Ledger CLI as a basis -- taking what Conservancy already does with it
and building upon that.  Other posts I've made on this list show that I
have a bias toward that.

However, I created Phase 0 for the project because the last time I did
something like Phase 0 was 2008, and the it's already been pointed out
that these codebases have changed a lot since 2008, and therefore
assuming that they haven't gotten good enough to be a good basis for
this job without a new evaluation seemed unfair and poor judgment to me.

In my view: the hypothesis is that things haven't changed, and using
Ledger CLI as a basis for a more complete and bookkeeper-friendly
accounting system is the "right answer".  However, that hypothesis
should be tested by dispassionate evaluation of existing codebases.


Perhaps I didn't answer your question, so let me know if I've answered
the wrong question and I'll try again.

> 2:  What is the size of the typical NPO we are looking at?  Are we
> assuming branch or centralized accounting for those with multiple
> locations?

Conservancy informally surveyed NPOs of different sizes.  The larger
ones (the kinds that would have multiple locations, etc.) weren't even
willing to dig deep into the features they need.  They're using
BlackBaud, or Great Plains, or something that "mostly works" for them.
They may be dumping thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars into
licensing fees and support each year for such and getting barely
adequate service, but things are mostly working and they don't want to
change.  CFOs of NPOs are even more conservative on this stuff than CFOs
are in the for-profit space.

Thus, I think our target market and the people we should seek to serve
first are small-to-medium-sized NPOs: orgs that would be stuck with
Quickbooks or a full outsourced solution otherwise.  Our discussions
have shown are the orgs that struggle most in their audits and are
sometimes forced to do custom development.

For example, I talked to one fiscal sponsor who uses Quickbooks as a
"backend" to dump things into and have a large set of software around it
to handle the "real accounting" for their thousands of affiliated
initiatives.  They'd love to do something better, but it's serious
software investment.

Large fiscal sponsors and other orgs, for the moment, are going to keep
paying licensing fees for BlackBaud.  We won't displace BlackBaud's
market for a decade at least.  Thus, the smaller market, building
something extensible that can grow, is the right approach, IMO.
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy