Proposed: Funding Open Source Accounting software

[Ean Schuessler]

Actually, it sounds a lot like the credit and debit accounts in OFBiz.
These are used for a variety of purposes in businesses. Purchasing
accounts used to restrict departmental budgets, pre-paid cash accounts
for customers to draw against, lines of credit extended to customers,
credit accounts for parts returned to suppliers and so on. Using these
accounts you could not only assign earmark accounts to specific projects
but even allow projects to define budgets for their internal working
groups and define spending limits in advance.

There is some support already for PayPal in OFBiz already so it should
be possible to turn drafts against those accounts into actual payments
to vendors. I know everyone hates PayPal because they are evil and
everything but the reality is that getting ACH support is expensive.
There are some other options like Swipe but they are also proprietary.
Its simply hard to get away from proprietary software in the banking
industry.

I have given some thought to doing a BitCoin integration in OFBiz even
though I don't have a customer for it. Some of Brainfood's
subcontractors might even accept payment that way "just for fun". Its
one of those rainy day projects for sure. The recent BitCoin crash has
definitely given me pause though. Its like keeping your savings in a
highly volatile commodity.

On 05/02/2013 04:34 PM, Jimmy Kaplowitz wrote:
> 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.