CIviBudget

A while back I wrote a forum post on how CiviGrant could be usefully extended to fulfill a wider function. I have just received a message from someone (datakid) who is prepared to put some time into extending it for his purposes which are explained here so I thought it might be worth soliciting people's thoughts and ideas. Datakid has indicated that he is new to the CiviCRM community and keen to get started so there are a couple of things that people might choose to comment on - 1) the approach that he can take that will best meet his goals and also help the broader community. 2) how to get help (IRC) & how to contribute his code back. While I have ideas about how CiviGrant might be made more generic I'll focus on Datakid's use case which is basically to records different types of expenses against each grant. It seems to me that the core additional functionality that Datakid needs is the ability to have multiple contributions against one grant. This is something that would be useful to many CiviGrant users as grants are often paid out in multiple payments. I would imagine that adding a table similar to civicrm_participant_payment to link payments to contributions would be appropriate. Somewhere on the grant - perhaps the grant edit screen there would need to be a button to add a contribution against it. Datakid also needs to record details about the payment. I note that you can create custom data for contributions by contribution type so this could be used to record details about the grant. Any thoughts anyone?

Comments

Hi Eileen

Thanks for your post. Extending CiviGrants will definitely make it more useful and we have had approaches from people who are looking for that functionality, so I definitely see a need.

We are also starting work on the development of the finances/banking project, so it would be useful for us to work on scoping out these two projects side by side as there may be an overlap between the recording of payments and receipts.

Feel free to e-mail me and we can work out the best way to get together to work on this.

Andrew
www.communitybuilders.com.au