Re: Computer readable version of SPI ledgers (per project)?

Hello all,

I am aware of the human readable financial reports online, currently
from Jan 2016 though to July 2019, in what looks like consistent
formatting:

https://www.spi-inc.org/treasurer/reports/201601/
https://www.spi-inc.org/treasurer/reports/201907/

Is there an underlying computer readable version (public or with
automated access to project representatives) for a project to use
in their own reporting systems?

Thank you,

Peter

Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Treasurer & SPI liaison.

* Peter Cock <p(dot)j(dot)a(dot)cock(at)googlemail(dot)com> [2019-10-15 17:08]:
> I am aware of the human readable financial reports online, currently
> from Jan 2016 though to July 2019, in what looks like consistent
> formatting:

Yes, SPI has moved to ledger, a text-based FOSS accounting tool:
https://www.ledger-cli.org/

> Is there an underlying computer readable version (public or with
> automated access to project representatives) for a project to use in
> their own reporting systems?

No, this is not available at the moment.

Since all data is in ledger now, providing such data to projects would
in theory be possible, but there would have to be some work,
including:

* Some sanitization of the data: projects are independent of SPI, so
there might be data privacy considerations. Currently there's no way
for donors to give consent for their information to be shared. I
think the long-term solution for that is a donation portal where
donors can give that consent and which then allows them to make payment
via a number of mechanisms (e.g. PayPal, Stripe).

* A policy for projects on data use

* Export and data sharing considerations (what format: CVS/ledger?,
private access how: SSH/git?, etc).

If you (or other projects) want data, please email the SPI board at
board(at)spi-inc(dot)org to indicate what data you want/need, what for, etc.

Martin

(SPI contractor working on financial reports, but not speaking for
SPI.)

Thank you Martin,

The long term ideas sound good - but only worthwhile if multiple SPI projects
would use them.

The potential privacy considerations are certainly a factor needing
particular care.

Before the OBF joined SPI, we used to prepare our own annual financial report,
and I am looking to automate something similar using our SPI ledgers. This may
need some additional data to match up specific income with conference sponsors,
or specific expenses with say GSoC travel, or our fellowship program. How
ambitious this gets will depend largely on how easy it is to automate the data
collection from SPI.

Right now, the anonymised data on the website should suffice for a first pass.
I have done a proof of principle web-scrapper in Python using Beautiful Soup 4
to pull out the plain text ledgers. The https://www.ledger-cli.org/
documentation
will undoubtable help with parsing that - but it sounds like
requesting the CSV or
ledger files directly might be more straightforward - especially if it
saves me time
on cross referencing transaction details.

Examples of things I would like to be able to do easily is report year by year
conference sponsorship income; or year by year server/hosting/domain fees.

Thank you,

Peter

On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 3:42 PM Martin Michlmayr <tbm(at)cyrius(dot)com> wrote:
>
> * Peter Cock <p(dot)j(dot)a(dot)cock(at)googlemail(dot)com> [2019-10-15 17:08]:
> > I am aware of the human readable financial reports online, currently
> > from Jan 2016 though to July 2019, in what looks like consistent
> > formatting:
>
> Yes, SPI has moved to ledger, a text-based FOSS accounting tool:
> https://www.ledger-cli.org/
>
> > Is there an underlying computer readable version (public or with
> > automated access to project representatives) for a project to use in
> > their own reporting systems?
>
> No, this is not available at the moment.
>
> Since all data is in ledger now, providing such data to projects would
> in theory be possible, but there would have to be some work,
> including:
>
> * Some sanitization of the data: projects are independent of SPI, so
> there might be data privacy considerations. Currently there's no way
> for donors to give consent for their information to be shared. I
> think the long-term solution for that is a donation portal where
> donors can give that consent and which then allows them to make payment
> via a number of mechanisms (e.g. PayPal, Stripe).
>
> * A policy for projects on data use
>
> * Export and data sharing considerations (what format: CVS/ledger?,
> private access how: SSH/git?, etc).
>
> If you (or other projects) want data, please email the SPI board at
> board(at)spi-inc(dot)org to indicate what data you want/need, what for, etc.
>
> Martin
>
> (SPI contractor working on financial reports, but not speaking for
> SPI.)
>

* Peter Cock <p(dot)j(dot)a(dot)cock(at)googlemail(dot)com> [2019-10-22 17:36]:
> Before the OBF joined SPI, we used to prepare our own annual
> financial report, and I am looking to automate something similar
> using our SPI ledgers.
...
> Examples of things I would like to be able to do easily is report
> year by year conference sponsorship income; or year by year
> server/hosting/domain fees.

You bring up a very good (related) topic, namely custom reporting.
Several projects have asked for some information (e.g. a project has
partnership program and want to see monthly partnership payments; one
project launched a campaign and wanted to know number/amount of PayPal
donations and number of recurring donations).

Such custom reports weren't really possible in the past, but are
possible in theory now. The questions are: what custom reports would
projects need, and (for the board) is that a service SPI wants to
provide?

--
Martin Michlmayr
https://www.cyrius.com/