Author Topic: CiviAccounts (Read 14914 times)

FatherShawn · November 24, 2010, 03:34:41 pm

Quote from: sgladstone on November 23, 2010, 08:25:08 pm

I have a client that often has the following situation:

A parent is billed by the staff for a full tuition obligation, such as for 3,000. for the school year.

Later on, due to financial hardship, the parent is granted a "scholarship" of 1,000, so the parent now only owes 2,000.

The staff records this in their previous A/C system as a "tuition adjustment" of 1,000. So the statement that is sent to the parent shows the original 3,000 obligation, the adjustment of 1,000. as well as their current balance of 2,000. (Plus any other financial activity for that time period. ) The staff also pulls a report that shows how many scholarships were given out for a given time frame.

How can this be handled by the new CiviAccounts features? One idea I had is this could be treated the same way as a partial refund, but use a different "ContributionType" than regular refunds.

Scholarships that work in this way sound like an instance of the abstract class we might call Discounts: No money is changing hands or being reallocated, but rather the price is being reduced.

Recording any kind of a payment seems more appropriate when the scholarship is actually funded by allocating funds from some kind of reserve.

Eileen · November 24, 2010, 03:38:40 pm

yes, so I am imagining it as a negative invoice not a negative payment.

But there needs to be a way of matching that credit against the payment - I'm hoping to get Andrew's thoughts on how that would look in the data structure

Andrew Perry · November 25, 2010, 11:22:02 pm

Quote from: FatherShawn on November 23, 2010, 03:27:53 pm

Quote from: andrew on November 09, 2010, 02:37:32 pm
Yes, there will need to be a Liability account for that....

So we will have the full suite of account types - Asset (money banked into account), Income (contributions), Expenses (Transaction Fees) and Liabilities (Tax)...

But don't worry folks, that doesn't mean I am suggesting we need a full accounting suite in CiviCRM!

Andrew

What are the advantages of maintaining these data structures in Civi rather than building an interface to pass the data that we naturally collect over to the accounting software?

After further discussion at the beginning of this week, the idea of having Income and Expense accounts has been parked - instead the focus is on Contributions being the source of Income information and the Financial Transaction table storing increases and decreases in a "Bank Account" asset based on payments received and refunds made.

Andrew Perry · November 25, 2010, 11:43:31 pm

I suspect there needs to be a separate "credit" table for credits and a table credit_entity table to link a credit to one or more invoices/contributions as different laws require credits to be documented in different ways in different jurisdictions, such that a negative invoice may not suffice.

FatherShawn · November 30, 2010, 06:26:41 am

Andrew-

Isn't a reduction in price different from a credit or negative invoice?

Andrew Perry · November 30, 2010, 11:05:41 am

Yes, a reduction in price is different, but if the person had already been billed for it then they would need to receive a "credit" to reflect the discount.

Rod · February 15, 2011, 02:41:20 pm

Eagerly awaiting the fruit of your labors. Thanks so much for all your excellent work in CiviAccounts!

Andrew Perry · February 15, 2011, 02:44:34 pm

Thanks for your support to those who have been working on this - it reminds me - I must see where everyone is up to!!

Regards

Andrew

Eileen · February 15, 2011, 03:34:46 pm

The last I heard is that the organization that is considering being a major sponsor of this work has still not decided - if you are interested in contributing to this implementation it might be worth putting your hand up in the hope that encourages them to make the decision to sponsor the work

Dave Warkentin · April 09, 2011, 09:35:29 pm

Regarding prioritizing a solution for cash or accrual. I have used two different CRM systems, one that had a quickbooks link and one that did not. I also worked in two different environments, one cash and one accrual.

The organization that I worked for that was accrual definitely needed the quickbooks connection. That is because we needed to track a promise to pay as income. This included registering for an event, purchasing a sponsorship, purchasing a membership. These transactions are recorded in the CRM first as this is where all stuff, with the exception of the bookkeeper worked. Passing these transactions on to quickbooks was a necessity as the receipts of actual cash/check/payment was recorded by the bookkeeper in quickbooks against an A/R transaction. Prior to getting the quickbooks connection we had to do dual entries for everything.

The organization I worked for that was cash didn't have a quickbooks connection for their CRM. This wasn't an issue as the promise to pay was still recorded in the CRM. Not a big deal though because nothing was recorded into quickbooks until the actual payment was received. The payment was recorded in the CRM and the bookkeeper then entered the payment into quickbooks against the appropriate account.

Based on these reasons I vote for a focus on a solution for accrual basis WITH an API for quickbooks.

Dave

Eileen · April 09, 2011, 10:56:37 pm

Hi,

I think in general the differences between the requirements for cash basis & accrual basis have been over-emphasized in the discussions. The focus of the data model has been to separate obligations to pay from actual payments and to ensure that once either exists it is 'locked in' and a reversal transaction is entered.

Some organisations will import obligations in aggregate into their accounting package, others will import payments in aggregate. Others will import individual obligations or payments - either through an import type method like the iif / csv approach or through a more sophisticated method. Either way I would hope that the invoice / payments apis will be able to output the data - take a look at the current MIH & please consider contributing! http://civicrm.org/mih

It's anticipated that Quickbooks iif be part of the current MIH. I did look at whether I could extend my CiviXero integration to cover quickbooks but got stuck with the web connector not working properly on 64 bit operating systems. Since I have Quickbooks Pro 2008 & 2011 is not out I decided not to persevere.

joanne · July 15, 2011, 08:59:12 pm

I don't know where this post belongs, I don't quite want the publicity of a comment on the MIH front page, but I want to query the advisability of having on MIH covering both Accounting integration improvements and Quickbooks integration. I believe I would be able to convince my boss to contribute to :

1. Enhance the CiviCRM schema to enable better integration of accounting concepts and systems with CiviCRM. This includes clear separation of "obligations" from "payments", and the ability to specify revenue and asset accounts.

But we do not use Quickbooks and have no intention of ever doing so and a payment to the current MIH would be seen as supporting some other organisation's development work.

Do the two items need to go together? Wouldn't it be better to separate the two elements into 2 MIHs?

I imagine that the two were combined because some (or all) of the seed funding came from organisations that use Quickbooks, but I really don't see the justification for having a MIH that will go into core that effectively promotes one commercial accounting system over others.

If the organisations who use Quickbooks were finding the entire MIH that would be different.

Eileen · July 15, 2011, 09:05:51 pm

Hi,

When the MIH was launched there was a perception that there was quite a bit of demand for QuickBooks integration - the demand doesn't seem to be backed by $$$ and at this stage I believe the core changes are in scope & the QB stuff isn't.

There is likely to be a second round of MIH shortly to try to make the front end functionality available to, for example, accept an event deposit & then have it paid off. If there is a use-case for the functionality that you think your boss would buy into then perhaps he might be able to seed sponsor it?

joanne · July 15, 2011, 10:35:45 pm

Deposits for events is not really something we would be interested in. Is http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Finance+and+Accounting the best place to see what is happening/proposed in this area?

Eileen · July 15, 2011, 10:38:16 pm

There is a fair bit to wade through but yes. What is the focus of your requirements?

CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

News:

Author Topic: CiviAccounts (Read 14914 times)

FatherShawn

Re: Question about handling scholarships for tuition

Eileen

Re: CiviAccounts

Andrew Perry

Re: CiviAccounts

Andrew Perry

Re: CiviAccounts

FatherShawn

Re: CiviAccounts

Andrew Perry

Re: CiviAccounts

Rod

Re: CiviAccounts

Andrew Perry

Re: CiviAccounts

Eileen

Re: CiviAccounts

Dave Warkentin

Re: CiviAccounts

Eileen

Re: CiviAccounts

joanne

Re: CiviAccounts

Eileen

Re: CiviAccounts

joanne

Re: CiviAccounts

Eileen

Re: CiviAccounts