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

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

On 10/18/07, Chris Travers <..hidden..> wrote:
> On 10/18/07, Chris Nighswonger <..hidden..> wrote:
> > On 10/18/07, Chris Travers <..hidden..> wrote:
> > > I am going to reply to both here.
> > >
> > > On 10/17/07, Chris Nighswonger <..hidden..> wrote:
> > > > 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.
> >

After speaking with the accountant and doing some of my own homework,
it appears that fund accounting differs from commercial in two main
points:

1. Every fund group has its own coa, gl, etc. ie. Operational Funds,
Loan Funds, Grant Funds, Maintenance Funds, etc.

2. Reporting. Fund accounting measures performance against budgets and
income vs expenses rather than simply income vs expenses.

Each fund group then has three basic types of funds (there can be
variation in number of and name of): Restricted, Unrestricted, and
Designated. Accountability for these funds must be maintained
throughout.

Monies may also be transferred between funds, however accountability
to these designations must be maintained.

It appears that budgeting is an integral part of fund accounting as
well. More especially with government entities.

> > >
> > > >    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
> >
> > ...elaborate.... (I assume :-)
>
>Basically  we need elaboration of the issues :-)

Here are some of the notes from our reqs document regarding Facilities
Management:

Fleet Maintenance aspect
Asset Maintenance/Fixed Asset S.P.O.E.
Warranty Alerts Expirations
Technical specifications, part #'s
Service logs
Recurring Tasks and Non-Recurring Tasks
By/For Resource allocations

> > > 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
> >
> > I have looked at CiviCRM. My concern is MySQL. If we are going to run
> > a patch work of apps, a common db would be nice.
> >
> > Until this post, I was unaware of Koha. Took a cursory look at it and
> > was impressed.
> >
> > >and port them to use the common LSMB framework (CiviCRM,
> > > Koha, some EMR solutions, etc).
> >
> > I assume this could be done with some custom code, sp's, and triggers.
> > (ie. transaction in one app triggers sp/code which manipulates data in
> > another apps db/table(s) etc....)
>
>
> Basically my idea is to try to leverage other projects as much as you
> can, and rewrite the database access components to work with the main
> database that will store everything.  Basically have a single common
> db with multiple client applications.

I like this idea.

> > > 2)  You could build up add-ons in a modular and modetely coupled way--
> > > each being a new client application to the LSMB database.
> >
> > If #1 is the most straight forward approach, it wins in my opinion. No
> > need to reinvent the wheel. Although as an admin, I am partial to a
> > common db rather than db's of different flavors. Its more to keep up
> > with from a maintenance/security prospective.
>
> The approaches are not even mutually exclusive.  Nothing prevents you
> from, say, coordinating with Koha and sharing at least part of hteir
> codebase.  The big disadvantage of going with things like CiviCRM and
> portng them to the LSMB db is that you are going to run into the fact
> that now you have to maintain software in multiple languages (PHP and
> Perl.  Now go ahead and add GNU-Med for accademic records and you get
> to maintain software in Python too. )
>

After looking at Koha more, it appears to be exactly what we are
looking for in Library Management and it is in Perl. So, I'm working
on porting it from mysql (yuk) to pg. After that, the mesh with lsmb
should be straightforward.

I don't like the thought of having to work in PHP and Perl
(and....and....and...) I took some time looking around a other oss crm
"stuff" and was sorely disappointed. CiviCRM is the best I have seen
so far. I don't know that it would be beyond reason to write code to
do this over the lsmb db.

I think the academic records part will just have to be written from
scratch (which we have started to do).

> > > > 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.
> >
> > It would be nice to here another school's thoughts/input.
> >
> Will do.

Perhaps some of this is a little out of scope for lsmb. Most
commercial packages offer "modules" to do each of these things to a
greater or lesser extent. However, I think it would greatly broaden
the userbase if lsmb handled nonprofit accounting. And
membership/donations is right down the crm alley.

Chris