investigating fiscal sponsors' use of accounting software

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Jim,

I wasn't familiar with the term "four side fund accounting", and I've
heard other accountants call it something different (e.g., our auditors
call it "three axis", but they're talking about the same thing, I think,
having read some of the materials online about "four side fund
accounting".)

Basically, the problem is the classic fiscal sponsorship problem, which
is the ability to track temporarily restricted assets that get released
back to the main org for earmark-related expenses.

I'm doing this now using tags and a chart-of-accounts hack with Ledger
right now.  The chart of accounts hack that I use is pretty standardized
in the industry.

Jim Garrison wrote at 20:30 (EDT) on Sunday:
> Searching for the phrase also provided a number of white papers
> describing the status quo in nonprofit accounting, which could be
> helpful as well in building a specification.

I'm curious which ones you read.  Most of the white papers I found are
thinly veiled marketing materials for services or proprietary software
systems.  Not that we couldn't learn from those, of course, but we
should treat them with a certain amount of skepticism.  But maybe you're
finding different ones than I just read.

> Bradley, once Phase 0 of the project gets off the ground it may be
> useful to talk in more detail with our contacts here.  Just let me
> know.

I think the key questions to ask them about are what specific system
they use (i.e., did they develop it in house or buy someone else's) and
also whether they needed to add the fund names to the chart of accounts
to get it all working.

I have an idea for how to do this with Ledger CLI that doesn't require
the chart of accounts hack I'm currently using, but I'm not sure it
would work easily.  That's why I'm focused right now on documenting what
I'm doing, so I can get a better sense of what parts of the system I'm
relying on and what is mere cruft from things I tried that are moot now.

My documentation work is slightly stalled but still ongoing at:
  https://gitorious.org/ledger/npo-ledger-cli

I'd welcome questions and comments on this list about it.  In some ways,
you could consider this a Phase -1 of the project.  As the project
proposal mentions, Conservancy "has what it needs" but it requires
simultaneously an accounting geek and command line tool hacker to
keep the books.
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy