Re: Non-profit/Campus Management Expansion for LedgerSMB?

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

I am going to reply to both here.

On 10/17/07, Chris Nighswonger <..hidden..> wrote:
> Hi all,
>   I am the IT director for a Bible College & Seminary. After spending
> nearly a year looking at the various accounting/crm/campus management
> packages and the associated very large price tags, we started hunting
> in the open source world to see what was available. LedgerSMB stands
> out as the best potential candidate for us to date. However, our needs
> are somewhat different than those of the typical business. So there
> will have to be some additional "modules" developed in order for
> LedgerSMB to become a complete solution for us. Here is a quick
> summary list of "additions" we would require:
>
> General:
>    Fund/Non-Profit Accounting (There are some stirrings on this I think...)

Something that would really help would be a few scenarios of
transactions and how they map to designations and accounts.


>    Facilities Management
In this as in most areas, the key is going to be understanding the
problem.  I would suggest that in each of these areas you may want to

>
> The financials will need to be IASB/FASB compliant.

Note that we do our best.   The codebase still has few areas where it
allows some businesses to cheat.  We are working on closing these.

> As well as SOX,
> etc. Any medical records of any real detail contained in the School
> Management module would require some level of HIPPA compliance.

I am not 100% sure of what is involved in SOX compliance at the
moment.  HIPPA is something I am more familiar with but is largely
beyond the scope of LSMB.

> And I
> believe that there are several "acts" of law other countries that
> might be of interest to those using these modules in them.
>
> After some email discussion with Chris Travers, it appears that the
> 1.3 code base (once stable) will be the place to start development on
> some of these things.

Agreed.
>
> I realize that there are some other oss apps out there that do
> crm/membership/donations stuff (ie civicrm) but we would like a
> unified solution rather than a patchwork of various solutions.

I am not sure I 100% agree with this assessment.  I am going to share
my experience and why I think that ideally you want a set of different
applications which are effectively sharing the same data.

When I worked at Microsoft, there was a time when we were using as
many as 4 CRM suites on a daily basis.  The problem wasn't that people
didn't want a unified solution.  The problem was that they did, and so
every time one department needed something not in the unified
solution, they had to get another tool

I think that basically you have two options going forward.
1)  You could look for other programs that do most of what you want
them to do and port them to use the common LSMB framework (CiviCRM,
Koha, some EMR solutions, etc).

2)  You could build up add-ons in a modular and modetely coupled way--
each being a new client application to the LSMB database.

In both cases the result is very close to the same.  However, I dont
think you necessarily want to either end up in a situation where you
have lots of applications which barely talk to eachother, or where one
application does it all.

>
> I would like to hear what others want/need or would like to say
> concerning these items both from the user and development standpoint.

If it would help, I will throw the idea at another school and see if
we can get something going here.  One area I could see helping would
be fundraising auctions.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers