This post started out as a reply to Eileen's "Banking Screen?" comment on my previous post on this topic, but by the time I was done, I thought that this warranted its own post.

I think that the core "Accounts" or "Banking" functionality that could be helpful to Civi users without getting too out of control, is:

We are finding that CiviCRM/accounts issues are becoming increasingly important for our clients, and Eileen's recent blogs and the discussion they are generating are a fantastic step towards helping find the best way for Civi to deal with financial transactions.

For example, I think it could be useful for Civi to ultimately develop functionality for maintaining simple bank accounts within CiviCRM, so that small organisations can maintain basic accounts without the headaches of integration with an external package.

Earlier today I had the pleasure of presenting and demonstrating CiviCRM to about 40 people working in the non-profit sector at Connecting Up 2008 (see http://www.connectingup.org)

This year's conference had a strong focus on the use of social media, and today's keynote speaker was Beth Kanter, who is well known as a trainer, blogger and consultant on how non-profits can make best use of social media (http://beth.typepad.com).

Almost 10 days have passed since the Melbourne Developer Boot Camp, but the feeling of being part of an enthusiastic and growing community of CiviCRMers "down under" is still strong.

It was great to have the opportunity to roll up our sleeves and work through some issues with Dave and Lobo that can help make our use of CiviCRM all the more effective. It was a chance to not only get a better understanding of the inner workings of the code and its frameworks, but also to develop friendships and an understanding of how we can all best contribute to the ongoing development of this great piece of software (particularly those of us in the Joomla! community).