ledger-npo, configurable categories, and integration with civicrm & paypal

[brush <..hidden..>]

allies!

it's wonderful to discover ledger-smb and this thriving community.  i'm
tech and financial coordinator for TLC Farm, a "small to medium"
non-profit (NPO) with $100-200k annual budget.  since our founding,
we've been committed to using open source technologies and approaches
regarding both software and information, content creation, etc.

sql-ledger was the only OSS accounting package available to us at the 
time; we've been running a mildly (and badly) hacked version 2.4.11 since
then.  CRM and donor relationship management has also been important to 
us, and we've been growing with the CiviCRM project on top of drupal.

i'd love to upgrade to ledger-smb, and am curious about various aspects
that would make our lives a lot easier.

A:
first, and perhaps most importantly: the transaction categorization
capacity of SL 2.4.11 is not adequate to the needs of a nonprofit; this
has been mentioned in the thread on ledger-npo from last year.

most organizations use a nested hierarchy within the chart of accounts
to achieve adequate reporting and distinction between different kinds of
transactions.  so, for example:

account 8110-022-123-ED07 might refer:

  1) to the type of entry (8110 - supplies)
  2) to the program or department from whose budget it came (02x =
education; 022 = sustainability workshop series)
  3) to the grant or restricted asset to bill (123 - the 2007 whole
earth foundation "climate conditions" grant)
  4) to a budgeted project which may span multiple programs/grants (ED07
- the Earth Day 2007 set of outreach, fundraising, educational, and
demonstration activities)

one wants to be able to report dynamically over the various categories
of transaction.  in the above example, one would want to be able to
search for "all education [ie. 02x] transactions" OR "-023- transactions
only" as well.  in fact, one would like to produce reports in which
summaries by level of details can be chosen.

ideally, one could accommodate the nested COA model since that is what
many org's already use.  however, one could also use other fields; we've
tried to do this by using "department" for program and "project" for
project; the restricted funds bit is left out, and a major headache.

moreover, there is a major difficulty in using the "department"
field: each transactions, involving multiple entries, can only be
attached to a single department.  however, frequently we have expenses
which are split over multiple departments (ie. telephone, split evenly
between fundraising, programs, and management).  it is bulky and
confusing to create multiple transactions for a single bill.  ideally,
the "department" (and other, hierarchically reportable fields) would be
able to be set per entry, like the project is.

it seems this may be possible in ledgersmb 1.2.x; is that true?  what
difficulties may remain?

B: for a variety of reasons, i think it makes sense for CRM modules to
be independent of accounting.  however, they will ideally coordinate
information with a minimum of re-entered data or data mismatch.  CiviCRM
is probably always going to reside on a different server than ledgersmb,
but we'd like transactions (probably entered first in CiviCRM) to be
smoothly uploaded into ledgerSMB.  any work on this?  thoughts?  links
to other examples of automated batch processing?

[UPDATE] i just noticed that some folk at least on the CiviCRM side are
investigating the possibilities: see http://civicrm.org/node/239 .  any
thoughts on how we can support this happening?

C: similarly, we'd like to be able to sync our PayPal transactions with
LedgerSMB (for now, just on a monthly basis).  we'd need some
dupe-checking probably on transaction code, since CiviCRM entries may
already include paypal payments.  any work on this?

i'm so excited!  i look forward to hearing back.
.b