Revitalization of npoacct project; Brett Smith will take over as project lead

[Josh Berkus]

On 08/25/2016 01:45 PM, Tim Schofield wrote:
> Firstly my apologies, when I replied earlier I didn't notice that my
> phone was only replying to Dave, and not to the list. Hope it is ok to
> bring in the list now
> 
> On 25 August 2016 at 18:19, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 25 August 2016 at 09:53, Tim Schofield <tim.schofield1960 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I have never really understood why people feel that NPO's need a different
>>> accounting package than other organisations. There is really nothing
>>> different on a transaction level be ween an NPO and a for profit
>>> organisation.
>>
>> What for-profit accounting that is libre software do you think shoud be
>> used?
> 
> An NPO would need some or all of the following. A General Ledger,
> Sales and Purchase ledgers, Stock, Fixed Assets, with the possibility
> of Payroll. These are precisely the same needs as a for profit
> organisation.
> 
> To answer Dave's question there are a number of libre accounting
> systems that do this (with the possible exception of Payroll which for
> various reasons is harder to do in libre package due to the vast range
> of different laws in different countries). It really depends on what
> you are looking for - web based, CLI based, GUI etc.

So NPO accounting is "similar but not the same".

1) In the general nonprofit sense, donations are fundamentally different
than purchase orders.  While it's possible to hack ERP systems to handle
donations, it's never better than an awkward workaround which leads to
slow data entry and buggy reporting.

2) NPOs in the US also have different federal reporting requirements
than for-profit corporations have.  For example, NPOs don't do P&Ls, but
they do need to do major donor reporting.  Again, you can create
workarounds, but it's still awkward and error-prone.

3) Conservancy, like SPI and Apache, are what is known as "fiscal
sponsors".  This requires being able to segregate revenue, payments and
account balances by sub-organization.  On the for-profit side, this is a
feature only of very high-end accounting systems, which then requires a
lot of setup and overhead to maintain, and still maps poorly to fiscal
sponsor sub-orgs.  In fact, I tried doing this with an ERP which
supported "departmental accounting", and simply couldn't make it work
without requiring literally 30min of data entry for each donation received.


-- 
--
Josh Berkus
Red Hat OSAS
(any opinions are my own)