Departments vs. Businesses

[Josh Berkus <..hidden..>]

All,

So, I'm setting up LedgerSMB to power SPI.   One of the things I need to 
account in SPI is for the different organizations, or "designations", we 
support.  That is, money comes in designated for a specific purpose 
(Debian General Fund, DebConf07, PostgreSQL, OVF, PGCon), and we need to 
track the purpose for which it's donated, as well as expenditures against 
the same purpose.  In the end, we need to make sure that the money spent 
for "OVF" does not exceed the amount of money collected for "OVF".

These designations are completely orthagonal to CoA categories; "Debian" 
may have Travel, Legal, Bookkeeping, Insurance, etc., and so may "OVF".  
They are also two-level, i.e.

Debian
	General
	DebConf07
	DebConf08
OVF
PostgreSQL
	General
	Summit
	PGCon07
	Development Fund
SPI
	General

Although spending restrictions are only enforced at the first level.

Finally, we need to be able to run ad-hoc reports by designation at any 
time.

So, I notice that LedgerSMB has two categorization schemes in addition to 
CoA: "Business" and "Department".   Would either of those two be adaptable 
to tracking designations, and if so, which one?

-- 
--Josh

Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco