Re: Current state of Foundation finances, upgrade internal systems and controls...

[Ekaterina Gerasimova <kittykat3756 gmail com>]

On 16 April 2014 11:19, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 04/16/2014 05:23 AM, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> > The more important something is, the more important it is that we have
> > good Free software to meet our needs.
>
> I agree.
>
> > If there are problems with GnuCash and it's the most suitable Free
> > software, let's get the problems fixed.
>
> There are, and a big part of the problem is that the GNU Cash project
> does not have a large developer community, partly because it does not
> have a large user community.

I'm not sure if you've tried the latest version of GnuCash (the 2.6
series), but it has seen a *lot* of improvements and bug fixes. I have
been a GnuCash user for 6-7 years now, both for personal and business
accounting, and can honestly say that the the latest version is miles
ahead of any of the previous ones.

I have also filed bugs on occasion, and I have always had fast and
good responses from the developers.

> There is LedgerSMB which Bradley Kuhn evaluated for the Software Freedom
> Conservancy some time back - I don't recall the issues he had with it,
> but I do recall that he did not embrace it.

SFC are currently working on some accounting software which may be of
interest to the Foundation: we will be investigating it further once
we're on top of everything.

> For invoicing, SimpleInvoices http://www.simpleinvoices.org/ might be a
> solution to look at?

There are currently no significant issues with invoice creation, and
I'm not sure that jumping between different software will be any less
time consuming. Having a GNOME theme for invoices in GnuCash will save
us 5 minutes of work per invoice, so it would be a nice bonus, but is
not a make or break deal for us.

> For Paypal integration, I know CiviCRM handled that - are we still using it?

We use a script that Tobi wrote and maintains, and the script is
currently being modified for EUR transactions by someone on the PiTiVi
team. As far as I am aware, accounting since at least 2009-2010 has
been consolidated to GnuCash only, but it may have been more recent
than that.

Paypal is still a pain because they do not offer any good transaction
export options. If Paypal were to start offering QIF exports, which is
what many banking institutions offer and which is an ideal format for
double entry accounting, then we wouldn't need need to process the
Paypal output. Unfortunately, this is not currently available from
Paypal, so regardless of which accounting software we use, we would
still need to process Paypal statements in some way before we can use
them.

> I imagine that integrating real-time data from the bank is still an issue...
>
> Cheers,
> Dave.
>
> --
> Dave Neary, Lyon, France
> Email: dneary gnome org
> Jabber: nearyd gmail com
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