Accounting solution

[chiesax]

agree on an accounting solution

[chiesax]

I have started to play with wave: https://www.waveapps.com/
Can handle accounting, invoices, bills, allows for collaboration, has reports, all data can be exported, is free.
I have also invited some of the committee members for evaluation.
Another plus is that credit card payment may be easily enabled (but with transaction fees).
Somebody else interested to test it? What do you think? Any other propositions?

[dbrgn]

(First off: I didn't get to test it yet.)

What's their business model? Why is it free? What happens with the data?

An alternative for accounting could be https://www.gnucash.org/. It's not as bad as it looks. http://plaintextaccounting.org/ is also nice for command line and version control fans.

Regarding invoices/bills: I could send you a LaTeX template that fits Swiss window envelopes. I could also write a generator that you could feed CSV data and that would generate the invoices.

If in doubt, I'd try to keep financials off the cloud :) But I'll probably take a look at wave tonight or tomorrow.

[chiesax]

Their business model is that you pay the transaction fees if you decide to use payments by credit cards. But all the functionalities are available even if you decide not to use this service.
Apparently they are TRUSTe certified.
The data can be exported, I have tested it and you get everything back as CSV files.
What's cool is that once you create an invoice, it is automatically accounted...

[chiesax]

(anyhow, apart from whether we choose it as a tool or not, I find it an interesting business idea...)

[dbrgn]

The question is whether it will work out :) http://www.billomat.com/ had free accounts for years, but recently asked all subscribers to either get a paid subscription or close their account. The free account is not available anymore.

[chiesax]

That's the risk, on the other hand there are advantages too... 😁

[chiesax]

... I'll check out gnucash tonight...

[dbrgn]

Ok. Just don't create any invoices through Gnucash, I think that's a pain :) But I think that can be done separately without much effort.

[The-Compiler]

If we want something self-hosted, odoo (aka OpenERP) might be worth a look? I have some experience with it, and while it's a full-blown ERP/CRM, we can also just use the modules we want.

Also, it's written in Python 😉

[chiesax]

I tried it when it was still called OpenERP. Apart from the operational overhead, at the time I tried it it was quite complicated to customize the reports (invoices), and the documentation was painful? Did they improve a bit?

[chiesax]

@The-Compiler can you easily deploy odoo on a remote machine? Or you mean running it on a local virtual machine on my home computer?

[chiesax]

Another advantage of wave is that one can easily change the "owner" of the account, for instance we may have info@pythonsummit to be the owner (I am testing it right now).
Also, the job of keeping track of overdue invoices (think about early bird tickets 30 days policy) is greatly simplified.
As for the risk of having our accounting data on the cloud, I do not estimate it as a high risk: we may from time to time extract the account data in CSV format.
Anyhow, independently on the solution, we may at some point need to migrate to another accounting system, and this will always be painful. Hopefully this will not occur too often...

[href]

I'm fine with going with wave. When it comes to bank transfers and/or credit card payments privacy hardly matters as it doesn't exist in the first place (the backends where these things go through are hardly secure and are almost certainly being monitored by state actors as well as private companies).

Plus everyone working on anything within the association should use the tool they like most.