CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I plan on using CiviCRM for a political campaign. The CiviContribute module is great for contributions, but I'd like to see a new module for tracking campaign expenses. Both contributions and expenses must be reported, so it would be nice to have both. I am not a coder so I would be willing to contribute money to an effort to get this implemented.

I thought about an accounting system, but thought it might be nice to have the contributions and expenditures kept in one place. I'll definitely reconsider it.

My only requirements for a CiviExpense would be to keep a log of expenses. Example expenses are stuff like - office supplies, web hosting fees, printing costs, postage, etc. The Secretary of State requires an itemized listing of each contribution and an itemized listing of expenditures.

@ourskool: I'm interested as well
@eileen: how far did you get? Is there a code base and/or wiki/tracker for CiviBudget?

My needs:

Tracking funds available to recently retrenched workers.

Each has a number of entitlements, depending on circumstances. These entitlements come from various sources, not necessarily controlled by the union, but need to be tracked.
Eg:
Union sponsorship (based on need)
Re-education scholarship (from the govt)
Retraining fund (provided by previous or soon to be previous employer)

Each entitlement can be used for certain expenses - new uniform, language classes, local college classes ("TAFE" here in Australia), getting cars fixed/buying train tickets etc. Some can be used for multiple uses (govt funds: clothing, transport and education)

So we need an "expenses" object that can be coupled (but not necessarily) with entitlements (Grants). I only want one-to-many (one grant - many expenses) but I feel like we should make it many-to-many, and potentially proportion the cost of the expense over a number of grants. Although, as I mentioned, I don't need this functionality - please let me know your thoughts on that.

Finally, I need to be able to show the amounts of entitlements remaining at any point in time.
eg:

Joe gets $500 retraining grant from MegaCorp.
$150 is spent on a barkeep course.
$50 is spent on first aid course

MegaCorp grant balance: $300

In particular, some of these entitlements have end dates, and therefore need to be used sooner than other funds available to an individual.

I want to start on something quite soon.

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9pm
Hmm, Maybe I should just extend CiviGrant so that it can accept many of a custom data group?
ie, a custom data type when used for an Individual gets an option "Does this Data Group allow multiple records". This is not available if the custom data group is "used for" Grant.

Is that a better idea?