@@ -330,49 +330,49 @@ equality, democracy, and sharing.</p>
raise $75,000 to employ a
developer for one year to make substantial progress on this project.</p>
<p>This project has the potential to save the non-profit sector
millions in licensing fees every year. Even non-profits that continue to use proprietary accounting
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
for the non-profit sector — a boon to funders, boards, and employees — bringing the Free Software and general NPO communities
into closer collaboration and understanding.</p>
<p>Thanks in advance for <a href="#donate-box" class="donate-now">helping us</a> develop Free Software to benefit all
non-profit organizations, and the
populations they serve.</p>
<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="#endorsements">Endorsers of this effort</a> include Fractured Atlas, The Free Software
Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, GNOME Foundation, OpenHatch, Open
Source Initiative, QuestionCopyright.org, and Software in the Public
Interest; all encourage you to <a href="#donate-box" class="donate-now">donate and support it</a>.</p>
Interest, and APRIL; all encourage you to <a href="#donate-box" class="donate-now">donate and support it</a>.</p>
<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
only Free Software, of course, centered around a set of straightforward reporting
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
documented and explained</a>.)</p>
<p>Our auditors were only familiar with proprietary accounting software, and
so our system seemed foreign to them, as it relies on Ledger CLI's text files, Emacs and
version control. During their questions
about our setup, we asked them to hypothetically prescribe a specific
proprietary software setup as a model for managing Conservancy's
accounts. Our chief auditor started by mentioning a few well-known
proprietary solutions. But then he paused and continued: <q>Given
that Conservancy's a fiscal sponsor with so many temporarily restricted
accounts, existing systems really wouldn't do that good of a job for