Do you use CiviCRM for contributions, pledges, and related financial data? Does your organization use the financial reports in CiviCRM? Does your organization export data from CiviCRM to your general ledger? Or do you want to start doing some of these things? If so, your input is needed on CiviAccounts. (You do not need to be a CPA to give input, but having a general understanding of how CiviCRM financial areas work currently is helpful)
Give your input via the survey at: http://pogstone.com/civicrm/petition/sign?sid=15&reset=1
(Thanks to the CiviCampaign component, I am using CiviPetition to handle my online surveys)
Background: One of the bigger structural changes to CiviCRM in the last few versions has been CiviAccounts. CiviAccounts includes many things you may use day-to-day, such as using multiple financial types within a single priceset, partial payments for events, sending relevent data to your general ledger software like QuickBooks, and more. Other parts of CiviAccounts are more structural: Such as the configuration areas for financial accounts, mapping payment instruments to asset accounts, and many core tables that were added or changed, bookkeeping records that get generated whenever a contribution is edited, and more.
Like any major area of CiviCRM, there are things that work well and other things that could be improved. To try to organize the priorities and possible changes for CiviAccounts, I have started a wiki document at: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviAccounts+Roadmap
That area already summarizes the feedback on the survey I have already analyzed.
One key concern is what is the best path forward for maintaining CiviAccounts. Should some portions of it be moved from core into extensions? what should remain in core? What is the maintenance strategy of the CiviCRM core team for the CiviAccounts area?
Another concern is what is the best way for people to share their processes, best practices, and new functionality with others in the CiviCRM community? For example, I created a new batch export format for AccountEdge, but there is no way for me to package it as an extension and share it with other AccountEdge users.
Also, how are these CRM CiviAccount features helping or hurting adoption of CiviCRM by organizations that are trying to decide on a CRM system. If word of mouth is that getting accounting data from CiviCRM into common general ledger software is difficult out of the box, or requires a lot of manual effort every month, etc. that could prevent an organization from even adopting CiviCRM in the first place.
I am looking forward to everyone's input on this important topic.
-Sarah Gladstone
sarah@pogstone.com
