Survey of existing FLOSS accounting systems (was Re: Revitalization of npoacct project; Brett Smith will take over as project lead)

[Tim Schofield]

On 25 August 2016 at 18:55, Josh Berkus <josh at agliodbs.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

We have implemented ERP's in a number of not for profit hospitals in
Africa and have had no trouble accounting for donations. You have
aroused my professional curiosity, how would you deal with donations
that can't be done by standard ERP?

>
> 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.

But NPO's do have Income and Expenditure reports and the distance to
go from a P&L to an I&E is not very far and surely doesn't justify
writing a new application from scratch. Reporting differences are part
of the implementation process.

>
> 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.
>

Well this form of transaction tagging/dimensions (different projects
give this different names) is hardly unique to NPO's.

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

I have been implementing ERP's in different countries for 30+years,
long before they were called that name. One thing that I have come
across so often is an organisation saying something like "I'm sure
your system is great but it won't work here, our organisation is
different to others". I have never yet found an organisation that is
really different. The skill is in the implementation.

Tim Schofield

-- 

www.weberpafrica.com
Twitter: @TimSchofield2
Blog: http://weberpafrica.blogspot.co.uk/