Treasury

Noisebridge is planning to revamp its accounting system over the next few months. Your friendly neighborhood treasurer will be attempting to outline the process here. Right now everything's still pretty messy. See the discussion page for more info, which will be integrated here soon. --Hurtstotouchfire 09:27, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

New Accounting System

Minimum Requirements

Following are the features that we need to keep track of our basic finances:

• import and reconcile transactions from Wells Fargo, Paypal & Square.
• keep repeating invoices for membership dues and an option to have the member invoiced automatically via email.
• some smart suggestions to reconcile incoming transactions with their matching invoices (xero is betarded at this. It searches only by amount, not by name and amount)
• custom categories for flagging transactions as various types of expenses and income to make taxes easier
• some reasonably convenient way to output data (graphs and reports would be nice, but good clean csv files would do. I can matplotlib that shit.)
• clear tracking of unpaid invoices
• Reasonably forgiving and customizable system (i.e. xero won't let you delete invoices once created, you can only mark them invalid. Not A Feature.)
• generate receipts easily
• web-based or linux-compatible local app. Some sort of remote data

storage and ability to access from multiple machines is required.

Bonus Features

These are in order of priority. Lacking any of these is not a deal breaker, but we really hope for the new system to include some of the higher-priority extras.

1. API
2. direct access to the full details of paypal or square transactions (i.e. notes to the payee, etc)
3. really smart algorithms for invoice reconciliation, alteration and deletion (i.e. delete invoices for this member during these dates or change the invoice amount on individual invoices without affecting repeating invoices)
4. an interface which isn't bleeding edge flash that trips up in Linux.

Options to look into

• WePay
  • Donations https://www.wepay.com/about/why_donations
  • Request Money https://www.wepay.com/about/why_bills
  • Recurring Invoices (does not have?)
  • Has fees (BOO) https://www.wepay.com/about/fees
  • API https://www.wepay.com/developer/reference
  • Does not look like it does much accounting wise.
• Quickbooks
• Hacker Dojo software - turns out this is just for billing.
• Cbase software - Aestetix has sent intro email, we'll see how that goes. --Hurtstotouchfire 09:27, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
• Less Accounting http://lessaccounting.com/
  • Mostly an accounting system...
  • Recurring invoices: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mia5zCN24Q4
  • API: http://lessaccounting.com/api (but doesn't have library implementations, so ActiveResource)
• GNU Cash (other examples here: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hackerspace_Software)
• Freshbooks http://freshbooks.com
  • Mostly accounting solution
  • Recurring invoices with Formstack integration http://blog.formstack.com/2010/05/27/freshbooks-integration-feature-upgrades/
  • API (Ruby / Python / Java) - http://developers.freshbooks.com/
• Zoho Invoice http://www.zoho.com/invoice/
  • Recurring invoices: http://www.zoho.com/invoice/help/invoices/online-recurring-invoices.html
  • API: http://www.zoho.com/invoice/api/index.html
  • Danny says that Zoho can't import very well.
• Turbocash http://sourceforge.net/projects/turbocash/
  • Recurring invoices: http://turbocash.net/Knowledge-Base/Repeating-Invoices/
  • Windows / Linux (with WINE) and very dodgy text...

Recurring Billing Options (only useful if we want to get a merchant account and bill credit cards directly, woo):

• Chargify http://chargify.com/features/recurring-billing-system/
• Spreedly
• Recurly http://recurly.com/
• CheddarGetter
• PintPay https://pintpay.com/