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 9:15 PM, Tim Schofield <tim.schofield1960 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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?
>

The problem at least on NPO ran into with LedgerSMB 1.2/1.3 was the fact
that they had both projects and funds, and these are orthogonal.  A given
transaction line could apply to *both* a fund *and* a project.  That's not
something we could really support in 1.2 or 1.3.

We solved that problem in 1.4 but frankly I don't know what the next issue
might be.  And I don't know to what extent that is a general problem or
something specific to their organization.

>
> >
> > 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/
> _______________________________________________
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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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