[Calendula-devel] quickbooks?

[Jason Maas]

Hi Darryl,

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Darryl Caldwell wrote:

>Does anyone out there have a connection with a nonprofit that uses
>Quickbooks for nonprofits? I am just wondering how prevalent it is.

Not us, we are just making do with "Peachtree Complete Accounting"
software for Windows (under VMWare, storing the data using Samba).  It's
not designed for non-profits.

>Has anyone looked at GNUCash and thought about its viability in a NPO
>setting?

Yes!  I've used GNUCash for my personal finances for about 3.5 years now.
Last summer we had a couple interns with accounting degrees investigate
the various OSS options for replacing Peachtree as our accounting package.
They decided that there was nothing worthwhile out there, but we've since
learned that people with an accounting degree and experience using shiny
proprietary accounting software tend to look for certain labels and
buttons.

It seems that the different flavors of most commercial accounting packages
all basically do the same things, but they'll be tailored for a certain
market (i.e.  churches/nonprofits, small retail stores, etc) and the
software will have certain labels & buttons to match the target market.
OSS like GNUCash is designed to be more generic and work in different
markets and countries, etc. so it doesn't have special "non-profit"
buttons.  But I think it can do everything we do as a small non-profit.
One bummer about GnuCash is that it currently only supports a single user
making changes to your data.  They've done some work on using an RDBMS
back-end to support multiple users working on the data at the same time,
but I believe that code is out of date and not complete.

Another package I want to look at more is SQL-Ledger (www.sql-ledger.org)
which is a web-app accounting package designed for small businesses.  It
can handle multiple concurrent users.

Neither of those applications has an integrated payroll system for
handling the paying of employees and all the taxes and fees that need to
be taken out of their gross salary.  But that doesn't mean that you can't
use them for your payroll!  Here are a couple links that discuss how to
use GnuCash for payroll:

http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v1.8/C/gnucash-guide/chapter14.html
http://www.aerospacesoftware.com/GNU_Cash_for_Business_users_Howto_Guide.html

Another option is to outsource your payroll calculations & check

>http://www.absolutebusy.com/contact_manager.html (proprietary, uses
>mysql, demo online)

Looks a little bit interesting, but it's not nearly as featureful as
Goldmine.

>Found the following link to Contract Pro Plus, a WinX app. The page
>contains some interesting flash demos of their system. Great
>screenshots.
>
>http://www.contactplus.com/products/pro/promain.htm

I didn't look at any of the Flash movies (blech), but I did skim through
some of the info about the program, and it sounds very similar to
Goldmine in purpose, scope, and pricing.  It even sounds better than
Goldmine in some ways (better security controls over data in a multi-user
environment).  This is the kind of app that an organization like
DiscipleMakers would like as OSS someday.  We don't have a "sales force",
but all of our staff do fund raising which looks a lot like sales from a
software point of view.  We need a good tool to allow our staff to share
information their contacts, especially in the common situation where
multiple staff know a specific donor and want to see all interaction
with that donor.

Jason