Proposed: Funding Open Source Accounting software

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 10:16:09AM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> >  Would $10,000 be spent better in another way more in line with our
> > remit?  I have no idea.
> 
> I assert that it would not.  Especially since that $10K represents
> money we have sat on for literally years, and nobody has introduced
> plans to spend it any other way.

As an example: wouldn't those money (+ a good deal of extra other) be
better spent to pay a professional accountant than in this fund-raising
initiative? I'm convinced that at SPI scale, that would make a real
difference in the quality of service offered to affiliated projects.

Don't get me wrong: I've worked with SPI accountant(s) for many years
and I know they do *a lot* of work. But that doesn't mean they could
scale indefinitely. At some point, given the purpose of SPI, you should
probably question whether accounting is the kind of internal job you
want to keep volunteer or go professional.

That said, I'm torn on this matter. I'm *very* excited by SFC
initiative. I think their goal is laudable, I know how seriously they
work, and that makes me confident that they can be successful with this
initiative and have a real impact on the day-to-day activities of NPOs,
and in particular umbrella organizations like SPI. But that doesn't mean
that *SPI* money are well spent by participating in the fund-raising.

I've only been a "customer" of SPI accounting services, so I might be
missing a lot of details. But from the outside my feelings are very
similar to Clint's: SPI current bottleneck on the accounting front is
more at the level of process/work-flow than at the level of accounting
software. Feel free to disregard this comment of mine if my perception
is wrong.

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack at upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader  . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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