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<h2>Fundraising Campaign: Non-Profit Accounting Software</h2>

<img src="/img/conservancy-accounting-campaign-logo.png" alt="Conservancy accounting campaign logo" style="float:left;" />

<p>You can help Conservancy fix this problem by <a href="http://sfconservancy.org/campaign">donating now</a>.  We seek to

raise $75,000 to employ a 

software will benefit, since the existence of quality Open Source and Free

  Software for a particular task curtails predatory behavior by proprietary

  software companies, and creates a new standard of comparison.</p>

<p>But, more powerfully, this project's realization

will increase the agility and collaborative potential

into closer collaboration and understanding.</p>

<p>Thanks in advance for <a href="http://sfconservancy.org/campaign">helping us</a> develop Free Software to benefit all

<p>Donors of $500 or more will be acknowledged in the THANKS file and other

  appropriate places in the codebase itself.</p>

<p><a href="http://sfconservancy.org/campaign#endorsements">Endorsers of this effort</a> include Fractured Atlas, Free Software

Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, GNOME Foundation, OpenHatch, Open

<h3>Background</h3>

<p>Like many non-profit organizations (NPOs) in the USA, Conservancy's

  financial accounts are audited annually by an independent accounting firm;

  we recently completed our fiscal year 2011 audit.  As usual, our auditors

  asked plenty of questions about our accounting software.  Conservancy uses

  scripts that we created to run on top

  of <a href="http://www.ledger-cli.org/">Ledger CLI</a>. (Conservancy's

  current configuration using Ledger CLI

  is <a href="https://gitorious.org/ledger/npo-ledger-cli">publicly

  about our setup, we asked them to hypothetically prescribe a specific

  accounts.  Our chief auditor started by mentioning a few well-known

  that Conservancy's a fiscal sponsor with so many temporarily restricted

  accounts, existing systems really wouldn't do that good of a job for

  you</q>.</p>

<p>Indeed, Conservancy reached out into the broader fiscal sponsorship

  community beyond the <acronym title="Free, Libre and Open Source Software">FLOSS</acronym>

  their own unique systems, idiosyncratically tailored to their specific

  environments.  Thus, good, well-designed, and reusable accounting software

  for non-profit fiscal sponsorship is not just missing in the software

  freedom community; it's missing altogether.</p>

  immediate need for work to begin on this

  effort.  <a href="https://www.fracturedatlas.org">Fractured Atlas</a>, <a href="http://fsf.org">Free Software

  Foundation</a>, The <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/foundation/">Mozilla

Foundation</a>, The <a href="http://www.gnome.org/foundation/">GNOME Foundation</a>,  <a

        href="https://openhatch.org/">OpenHatch</a>, <a href="http://opensource.org">Open Source Initiative</a>,

  <a href="http://QuestionCopyright.org">QuestionCopyright.org</a>, and <a href="http://www.spi-inc.org/">Software in the Public Interest</a> have

  support it.</p>

<p>Conservancy is uniquely qualified to undertake this task.  Using only Free

  Software, Conservancy already meets the complex accounting challenges of

  earmarked, directed donations for over thirty different projects.  We've

  learned much about this work in our first seven years of

<h4>Phase 0</h4>

<p>Some Free Software accounting systems do exist.  A previous informal

  survey of these systems that Conservancy conducted in 2007 led us to the

  conclusion that, in general, these systems were heavily geared toward

  were completely hopeless for the specific needs of a fiscal sponsoring

  organization.  Conservancy's assessment at the time was that these

  challenges could be addressed only with a large rewrite of one of these

  systems.  Conservancy chose

  <a href="http://www.ledger-cli.org/">Ledger CLI</a> precisely because

  it provided flexibility and configurability not present in any other Free Software

<li>Basic accounts payable/receivable (with invoicing)</li>

<li>Tracking and reporting of non-profit income types (related business

  income, unrelated business taxable income, donations, etc.)</li>

<li>Basic backup documentation tracking for expenses and payments</li>

<li>Basic bank statement reconciliation reporting</li>

<li>Basic annual audit preparation reporting

  of this portion is already complete</a> and has been relied on for

  real-life audits; but the prototype is just a hack and needs to be

<li>Ability to easily handle all these features on a project-by-project

  subset of the accounts, and to easily export and excise that subset from

  the system. (i.e., support for temporarily restricted assets, earmarked for

  fiscal-sponsored projects)</li>

<li>Multi-currency support and reporting</li>

</ul>

<p>It's highly unlikely that the for-profit sector will adapt existing Free

  Software accounting systems to meet the differing needs of NPOs (let alone

  the more complex needs of fiscal sponsors; based on

  advice from our auditors and other fiscal sponsors, Conservancy understands that <em>no existing

  solution &mdash; proprietary or Free &mdash; meets the requirements of fiscal sponsorship accounting</em>).  Fiscal sponsors like

  Conservancy must track a separate set of books for every project, keeping

  their books with them.  Yet, the books of the entire organization are the

  aggregate of the books of all these projects, and internally, they need to

  be presented as a single set of books for those purposes.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, even if an organization is not a fiscal sponsor, non-profit

  accounting is <em>just different</em> than for-profit accounting, particularly in

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

  for-profit equivalents.</p>

<p>Conservancy's existing system is working adequately, but requires daily

  the relatively more expensive time of a highly technical person to do the

  job of bookkeeping.  Also, the system cannot easily be adapted in its

  on what Conservancy has learned and produce a non-profit accounting system

  that corrects these flaws.</p>

<p>Finally, Conservancy's mission (as stated

on <a href="http://sfconservancy.org/docs/conservancy_Form-1023.pdf">our Form

1023 with the USA IRS</a>) includes producing Open Source and Free Software.

specific need that so many NPOs (including us) have.  If no one steps up to create Free Software to replace the widely used

proprietary software, NPOs in aggregate will pay <em>much more</em> money for

proprietary licensing than Conservancy will ever spend in developing a

replacement. Please donate

generously to help us do it!</p>

<p><q>As a national fiscal sponsor with over 3,000 arts and cultural projects

under our umbrella, Fractured Atlas is ecstatic about this effort's

potential. After 15 years wrestling with Quickbooks and other inadequate

options, the idea of an open source tool designed specifically for this niche

of the field is beyond welcome. We wholeheartedly support the Conservancy's

work on this front and look forward to seeing where it leads.</q> &mdash;

<a href="https://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/bios/staff/1/Adam%20Forest_Huttler">Adam

  Huttler</a>, Executive Director, <a href="https://www.fracturedatlas.org">Fractured Atlas</a></p>

<p><q><a href="http://QuestionCopyright.org">QuestionCopyright.org</a> is

just one of many organizations that would benefit from a Free Software

enthusiastically support the Conservancy's campaign to create one, and look

forward to using the result.</q>

&mdash; <a href="http://questioncopyright.org/speakers/karl_fogel">Karl

Fogel</a>, Executive Director,

  <a href="http://QuestionCopyright.org">QuestionCopyright.org</a></p>

Director, The <a href="http://www.gnome.org/foundation/">GNOME Foundation</a></p>

<p><q>The Open Source Initiative has shared the experiences of Software

     Freedom Conservancy in navigating the financial management needs of

     non-profit organisations and shares their concern. We have many NPOs as

     members and we welcome this useful initiative by Conservancy.</q>

     Initiative</a></p>

<p><q>The <a href="https://fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a> is committed to doing all of its work,

both public-facing and internal, using only free software. We are thankful to

the developers of SQL Ledger for providing the accounting software that has

served us well for many years. As we have grown, so have the complexities of