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

[Chris Travers]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 9:24 PM, Tim Schofield <tim.schofield1960 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 25 August 2016 at 19:51, Chris Travers <chris.travers at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Not so much re-opening the debate (I am not here to convince people to
> use
> > LedgerSMB so much as to learn what we can do to better serve the NPO
> > community) but one thing I would suggest is that working with various
> > projects may get you further for less than trying to build your own
> project.
> >
>
> I agree, this project has spent a lot of time and money trying to
> re-invent double entry transaction processing. Much better to work
> with an existing project to meet any specific requirements.
>

What I saw in the previous effort was less an effort to reinvent double
entry accounting and more to build a solution on top of an existing
CLI-based open source double entry accounting engine.  My comment was not
second guessing that decision, but rather asking what the purpose of such a
solution is.  I.e. I am questioning scope rather than direction.  The
current direction has a lot to recommend it.  The scope might be overly
ambitious though.  There are also some things which pose some issues namely
concurrency etc, but for core benefits, I don't think those matter much.
It is better to have a transparent and simple reference implementation than
a complex and full-featured one which scales to the needs of larger
organizations.

If you are trying to build a complete project to take open source directly
into the NPO sphere, that's a *lot* of work.  Trust me, I have been at
complete solutions in this area now for a decade.  One major problem is,
complete solutions are never complete in part because one needs to know
where people should experiment with business processes and where the
software needs to nail this down.  In the areas where experimentation is
important, you don't want to nail things down or provide a complete
solution.

On the other hand, if you figure out the issue that needs to be solved and
create a simple reference implementation for that piece then you open up
two very important things.   First, you open up internal and external IT
folks to implement it as an important piece of the solution, and secondly
you open up for other projects to take it as a reference implementation and
build it into their projects.

So one thing I would suggest is that the first step ought to be thorough
documentation of how ledger-cli is currently used by the sfconservancy with
regard to the problem of funds accounting.  I.e. How things get entered.
What reports you are looking at, etc.  All of them.

>
> Tim Schofield
>
> www.weberpafrica.com
> Twitter: @TimSchofield2
> Blog: http://weberpafrica.blogspot.co.uk/
> _______________________________________________
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> Wiki URL: http://npoacct.sfconservancy.org/
>



-- 
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

Efficito:  Hosted Accounting and ERP.  Robust and Flexible.  No vendor
lock-in.
http://www.efficito.com/learn_more
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