Re: Proposed: Funding Open Source Accounting software

On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 04:10:47PM -0500, Ean Schuessler wrote:
> Agreed. In the past I had mentioned Apache's Open for Business project.
> It does fairly sophisticated accounting as well as multi-facility
> inventory management, customer relationship management, tracking project
> hours and manufacturing line control. For actual small to medium size
> businesses, the ledger is just a part of the problem.

The needs of a NPO are quite different than those of a for-profit business such
as OfB might help, especially a fiscal sponsor like either SPI or Conservancy.
The key difference is a large number of temporarily restricted accounts (for
Conservancy) or earmarks whose purposes we need to respect (for SPI). The
financial statements are also different. Further, most of what you listed
amongst OfB's features are irrelevant to fiscal sponsors like SPI, while of
course they're useful for other businesses.

Quickbooks and Microsoft's equivalents, by the way, don't handle this well
either, though NPOs usually muddle through as best they can. Conservancy is not
reinventing the wheel - they're modifying existing wheels to handle our
weather.

- Jimmy Kaplowitz
jimmy(at)spi-inc(dot)org