CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

The Accounting Batch feature is great. The accounting control enabled within it is fabulous, and I understand it was probably no small feat to get that working as well as it does. The fact that it's customized for QuickBooks really makes it shine.

The one glaring shortcoming is the lack of the Class field. So many QuickBooks users rely on that field, but the fact that Civi doesn't have it precludes them from using the accounting integration.

One solution would be to add the Class field to the Contribution record, and then add it to the accounting batch exports. But a more universally usable solution (and perhaps simpler) would be to make the fields that get exported in the accounting batch defined by a Profile. Then users could add whatever custom fields they needed for their accounting systems to the contribution records, and add them also to the accounting batch export profile so they get exported during the accounting batch export.

Does this approach make sense?

I'll see if I can do that (after I get that extension checklist done).

My initial thought about adding it as a property of a financial account or type is that that would seem nullify the whole purpose of the class. The class further defines the contribution, so if the class was by definition the same for every contribution of a given account or type, how would it help further define the contribution? But I too would need to look at examples and walk the process all the way through to be absolutely sure.

I like the profile idea because a. it fits in to the existing Civi paradigm (e.g.like the way a Profile defines the batch entry fields) and b. it allows flexibility for other accounting systems.

I think we could get folks to support this. Any idea on a ballpark number of hours / cost?

here are some sites that describe how classes are used to track Funds.

http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/pages/inproducthelp/Core/QB2K12/ContentPackage/Verticals/Nonprofit/nnp_tracking_funds_with_classes.html

http://forums.techsoup.org/cs/community/b/tsblog/archive/2013/02/25/configuring-quickbooks-for-use-in-a-nonprofit-using-customerjobs-and-classes-utilities.aspx

http://www.ehow.com/how_6809382_use-classes-quickbooks-nonprofits.html