Recording Income

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>
> OR
>
>   are donations actually invoiced? this gets weird, different American 
> states do it differently, etc. and I lose general interest around now 
> but other regular contributors to this list have standard texts. 

THAT is precisely the problem. And it's not a gnucash problem as I see 
the problem with organizations using other software like QuickBooks Pro.

a) The organization may want to invoice and produce statements for its 
members (the members may want this) even though the donations are NOT 
legally "receivables".
b) The members might want/expect unified statements, not separate 
invoices for their pledge amounts which are legally receivables. Pledge 
accounting is even more complex as pledges may cover multiple periods. 
For example, if I pledge $1000 per year for the next three years only 
the first $1000 is currently receivable.
c) The organization might have chosen to be keeping its books on the 
cash basis (Non-profits have a lot of freedom with things like that).

Before jumping on the gnucash developers, the reason I replaced 
QuickBooks Pro for Non-profits is that it too did NOT provide much of 
the special features Non-profits need. Maybe different now, but at least 
back then, did not even have the category "donor"!

A "guncash for non-profits" would require a different, MUCH more 
flexible, complex invoicing system where parts of of an invoice could be 
receivable and other parts not, pledge accounting to keep track of the 
full pledge but only having the portion currently due as a receivable, 
etc. PLEASE: I am not suggesting that we can't use gnucash, it's not 
really worse in this regard than the alternatives, but it might require 
a little "playing around" (subsidiary books with attendant multiple data 
entry). The point here is that making choices requires looking at the 
"management reports" the board will want to see and keeping data so that 
these can be produced.

Michael D Novack, FLMI