Non-profit organizations (NPOs), particularly 501(c)(3) charities in the USA,

have their own specific accounting needs.  These often differ from for-profit

accounting needs.  For example, for-profit-oriented systems often make

problematic assumptions about the workflow of accounting tasks (often because

NPOs rely primarily on donations, rather than fee-for-service or

widget-selling income).  Also, non-profit income is categorized differently

than for-profit income, and the reporting requirements vary wildly from their

for-profit equivalents.

This project is designed to provide some basic templates, tutorials, workflow

documentation and scripts to handle accounting for an NPO.  The primary

example is a

This tutorial was written primarily based on

from 2008-10-22 to present for its own accounting needs.  While Conservancy

has done well using this system, and believes that its account system meets

Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), this document **does not**

constitute advice from a CPA nor legal advice for a non-profit that seeks to

comply with relevant state and/or federal accounting requirements for USA

non-profits.  The authors make no representations nor warranties regarding

this information and this information is provided for discussion purposes

only.  Readers of these tutorial and templates are urged to seek professional

advice from a CPA and/or tax legal counsel in constructing an accounting

system appropriate for your organization.

Furthermore, given the authors' limited knowledge of accounting requirements

    * *or* the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States

      license, as published by Creative Commons, Inc. (aka CC-By-SA-USA-3.0)

In addition, when you convey, distribute, and/or propagate this document

and/or modified versions thereof, you may also preserve this notice so that

recipients of such distributions will also have both licensing options

described above.

A copy of GPLv3 and CC-By-SA-3.0-USA can be found in the same repository as

this file under the filenames GPLv3.txt and CC-By-SA-3.0-USA.txt.  If this

document has been separated from the repository, a

and a