Implementor, administrator
Third Sector Design
We work with non-profits to help them use and understand Civi. It's such an important tool for these organisations and it's great to see people using it in different and interesting ways. Using and working with Civi is made so much more fun and useful by the enthusiastic and talented community surrounding it.
Developer
Electronic Frontier Foundation
I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We switched to CiviCRM so that we could be sure that our membership data stays safe, secure, and private. Now we have control over our CRM and can customize it to work for our needs.
Implementer, Developer
EE-atWork
The CiviCRM community is a very friendly and helpful community. Whatever the challenge, I always get enough help from the forum or IRC to nudge me in the right direction. For me joining in a CiviCRM sprint once or twice a year is the best, meeting other community members in real life, sharing successes, challenges, problems and meals :-) Seriously, I think the active community is one of the serious assets of CiviCRM and I am proud to be part of it! And when I grow up I promise to do more :-)
Administrator, End-user
AustLII
AustLII is the leader in the free access to law movement and has a philospophical bias towards open source systems. After investigating all the other possible major alternatives it seemed logical to turn to CiviCRM. We have software developer resources, and though it is not core business, we may be able to direct some of these resources towards improving CiviCRM for the community.
Implementor, Developer
PeaceWorks Technology Solutions
PeaceWorks provides technology solutions for not-for-profit organizations. CiviCRM fills an important niche among our clients who need a flexible, comprehensive, user-friendly, web-integrated CRM solution.
Administrator and End-user
CiviCRM is a powerful tool that could be really useful for many non-profits in Mexico.
Unfortunately the community is very small in my country. I hope that in the next years the community expands around Latin America.
End-user and Developer
Woolman Sierra Friends Center
If it weren't for CiviCRM we'd be using at least 5 different
systems for Woolman: one for donor management, another for email newsletters, a third for our school enrollment, a fourth for our summer camp registration, and then a whole bunch of spreadsheets for keeping track of things like event attendance, prospective students, CSA memberships, etc. And of course none of those systems would talk to each other or make it possible to get a whole picture of the many ways one person might participate in our education center's activities. Migrating all of our scattered data and disparate systems to CiviCRM was a long and challenging process, but the results have been more than worth it. Our ability to track and report on our programs has improved dramatically, while the burden on staff to do data entry has been greatly reduced, and our participants are happy that they can now register/enroll online rather than mailing or faxing paper forms.
End-user, administrator
International Society of Bayesian Analysis
ISBA is an international non-profit society with members from all over the world. We have sections that represent different scientific areas and chapters that represent different regions of the world. Civi Member powers our membership system! We use CiviEvent for Conference and Workship registration, and utilize CiviPetition for creating new sections to our society through member petitions. We are epxloring how CiviGrants can be used to track our travel awards and look forward to features for integrating accounting and finance. As a growing non-profit CiviCRM plays a major role in managing our membership system!
Developer, Implementor
Réseau Koumbit
As non-profit consultants working for non-profit organizations, we found CiviCRM to be particularly well suited to answer the common needs of activist associations, charities and other medium-sized groups. Based in Montréal, we've helped local and international organizations migrate to CiviCRM to manage their memberships, events, communications and fundraising campaigns. We empower our clients and assist them when they need us.
Implementor, Developer
Pogstone, Inc.
I have been involved in the CiviCRM community for over 4 years, and enjoy implementing and programming CiviCRM for a variety of non-profits. I have been amazed at the rapid pace of innovation delivered with each new release, and CiviCRM's flexibility in being able to accommodate a variety of requirements. I have learned a lot about CiviCRM by participating in CiviCon, online forums, and CiviCRM book sprint.
End-user and Developer
Woolman Sierra Friends Center
Working with CiviCRM enriches our commonwealth. Any investment in CiviCRM is
shared by the community as a whole. Community organizations naturally complement the spirit of Free/Libre Software.
DEVELOPER
WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION
At the Wikimedia Foundation, we leverage CiviCRM to maintain millions of records of donors and their contributions. Working with the product and particularly with the community has been a terrific experience. There's nothing quite like two open source organizations working together to meet their respective goals while ultimately strengthening the open source community as a whole.
Comments
(ac)count me in
Sarah,
I'm interested in all the points you've raised.
Ken
Very Interested
Hi Sarah,
If it's helpful to have someone who can't really contribute a lot technically, but is a very keen end-user, in on this, then I'm in. I'd just begun having a conversation with the Dharmatech guys about this, so it's exciting to see I'm not the only one who's keen.
Cheers,
Mark
count me in
hi,
i work for a non-profit, and we are currently looking at getting a web-based solution.
fund splitting and deposit batches are important components for us - i think civicrm is pretty cool, but would need to build some of this functionality first.
i know a bit about php/mysql but am no expert. if there is anything i can contribute please let me know. if i start building any functionality i will share!
james
We're in!
Hi Sarah
Thanks for all the work you have been doing on the wiki. We've got the database structure in place in 3.3 to handle 1 & 2 above by:
1) One payment transaction being able to be applied to one or more contributions, event registrations, membership etc
2) A deposit being treated like another form of payment transaction, in that it can link a whole bunch of payment transactions (ie cheques and cash amounts) into a single deposit
I will try to update the documentation of this on the wiki over the weekend. I have some ideas on how to address 3) as well, which I think I mentioned to Dave on a skype call, but which I have never got back to documenting - so I'll try to do that too and see what you think!
(PS - I also have an accounting degree for my sins!)
Andrew Perry
Community Builders Australia
Hi Sarah, I think I'd
Hi Sarah,
I think I'd have to take a very big step back if I wanted to avoid being roped into this one. I'm hoping to see Joe Murray's name on the list too soon
Switchback is in
My company, Switchback (http://switchbackcms.com), has a specific internal goal of March 1 for this to be tested and in production. We are willing to help with planning, and development.
Yeah! new team members!
Thanks to everyone who is interested in the new CiviAccounts team! As the main goal of this team is to have a Civi-Make-it-happen campaign, I have clarified the priorities in the wiki document. There is a new first section titled "Priorities for the planned CiviAccounts Civi-Make-it-Happen campaign"
Everyone should update and flesh out these use-cases. Ideally we should be ready to launch a fundraising "Civi-Make-it-happen" campaign by Nov. 18. To meet this goal, the core team needs detailed use-cases that need to be supported ( as well as prioritizing these goals )
Also it will be easier to raise money for this project from non-technical folks, if they can understand what the results will be. ( Most bookkeepers eyes glaze over if I start talking about cool new MySQL table columns )
Can everyone give their feedback on the wiki ( in the new section at the top ) before Nov. 18 ? Is this a realistic date? Then after Nov. 18 we can start promoting the new campaign and raise the needed funds.
Thoughts? Ideas?
Definitely ready to support this financially
Especially the part about a deposit for an expensive event (i.e. http://www.studentshelpinghonduras.org/trips)
We'll keep an eye out for when the fundraising meter gets posted!
Great to see such energy!
I'm glad to see such interest. I'll be helping with use cases and development, and expect there may be some Canadian orgs that can assist with development and perhaps some money too. Some of there use cases are for items not identified above, but which are on the wiki and would assist many, e.g. batch add/update functionality to help with cheque entry when some but not all of the payments are from people in CiviCRM.
We can help with QB
Great to see this topic coming up again. We did some exploratory work last year with the idea of a QuickBooks integration with CiviCRM. There was some initial interest but the project died because of lack of funding and low priority compared to our client work. We took it as far as pushing a contribution to QuickBooks w/SOAP and QBXML but stopped short of building a working prototype.
We would like to help with the planning and development of the QB integration. The QuickBooks PHP Dev Kit would be the logical framework to use but there may be others. It's the one we're familiar with and it really was (and may still be) the only game in town.
Please no Quickbooks integration
Quickbooks is too squirrelly. FWIW, using QIF files is kinda okay but since we are FLOSS here we should keep things as open standards as possible.
Quickbooks, open source
QuickBooks is no more proprietary than Authorize.Net, First.Data, Pay Pal, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or any of the other 3rd party services/products that CiviCRM already hooks into.
What open source accounting package do you see as being widely used? In which countries? Ideally CiviAccounts will have a structure for writing code for other accounting packages. Also, are you aware of an open standard that supports sending data to multiple accounting packages?
QB vs others
Hi,
I just want to stress that there are 2 sides to this - getting CiviCRM in a state where it more logically integrates and doing the integration with other providers. The funding / enthusiasm will determine which providers are developed for but the preparatory work will need to focus on the underlying recording of transactions in CiviCRM and things like part-payments and the ways in which CiviCRM exposes that data to external systems / accepts data (likely via an API).
This isn't an either / or. As Sarah says there are a number of interfaces with proprietary systems in CiviCRM and we should develop CiviAccounts with the expectation that multiple providers will be integrated (eventually)
then what?
Bruce,
1. What does 'too squirrelly' mean?
2. Most nonprofits use QuickBooks. What do you propose... recreate that functionality in CiviCRM? Who's going to pay for that work? Should CiviCRM step into the 'accounting software' world? Probably not.
3. Look at the QBXML specification and look at QuickBooks PHP Dev Kit, then report back about "open." With a published (and hopefully stable) API, open/close source becomes less of a technical debate and more of philosophical one.
I can help some
Hi Sarah - Thanks for pushing forward this effort. I've recently just finished a project for a non-profit that uses QuickBooks. We are using the Web Connector and the QB web framework from Keith Palmer. Essentially, I wrote a set of modules that create the XML to be passed for Customer Modifications, Sales Receipts, and Customer Additions.
I ran into a lot of nuances that I had to overcome with the way some of the Civi back end is storing items. I don't have a lot of free time between now and the end of the year, but am happy to help however I can. Please feel free to contact me.
Thanks,
Tracy
Joining CiviAccounts
Hi,
The company I work for would be happy to provide some input and feedback to the CiviAccounts module. We are quite keen to see a good accounting facility working within the CiviCRM framework.
Regards,
William Owyong
Programmer/Developer
Knowall Software Pty Limited
Count me in
I am CIVIC CRM newbie. But I work for a non profit part time and would like to see this accounting package built.
Count me in as an end-user. I can help with SQL a bit.
One request is not to tie in with Quick Books but rather look at some XML or DB based exchange.
Some non profits including us use open source or commonly available MS Office tools for accounting.
Is this still a Make-it-Happen?
We're currently exploring CiviCRM, and once CiviAccounts is available (at least the Multiple Payments concept) then we'll be going ahead.
Back in November there was talk of this being a Make-it-Happen project, but I can't find anything more recent, or how to contribute to the funding. What's the latest news?
Re: CiviAccounts
I'm interested to help as a user. -Rod
Is anything happening with this?
I need this functionality for a couple of sites and am more than willing to do whatever coding is necessary to make this happen if someone will point me at the current version or status.