[GNC] Ideas and recommendations for community project

[Stan Brown]

Stan Brown
Tehachapi, CA, USA
https://BrownMath.com
TL;DR version: I suggest contacting treasurers of other community
projects for best practices.

(Longer version below.)

On 2023-07-31 09:43, gibelium at gmx.net wrote, in part:
> 
> Obviously my basic question was latently wrongly formulated. Of course,
> first of all I would like to develop an idea with which kind of accounts
> I can map the money flows in a meaningful way. I thought that this
> mailing list would be a good possibility to collect ideas and
> recommendations to create a concept out of it. The concrete mapping in
> gnuCash is definitely the second step.
> 
> Maybe a good idea is to clarify my questions in a forum for finance and
> accountants. If anyone has recommendations for one, they are very welcome.

Hi, Sebastian. Welcome to GnuCash!

We get a lot of questions on the list that are really accounting
questions, not GnuCash questions. And most of them get the right answer:
what would you don with pen-and-ink accounting? Do the same in Gnucash.

You might think people are being unhelpful, but rather they're trying to
avoid answers that are wrong _for_you_. When someone posts a question,
they often omit relevant facts that would change an answer -- look at
the thread about text in a Description field for an example. Now, that
one is actually about GnuCash, not accounting, so people with expertise
are asking questions to uncover missing information, sharing their
experience, or both.

But when you ask an accounting question, particularly a rather esoteric
one, it's going to two sets of people: those who are _not_ professional
accountants and are reluctant to give an answer that might be incorrect
because of information the questioner didn't think to include, and those
who _are_ accountants and therefore _can't_ answer, just as a doctor
can't diagnose in a social setting because she hasn't examined you.

My suggestion, for what it's worth: Since you do understand that your
first step is to decide what accounts you need, why not find some other
community projects and ask their treasurers to share advice, and perhaps
even their chart of accounts. Unlike all or most of us, they'll
definitely be familiar with accounting for community projects.

Stan Brown
Tehachapi, CA, USA
https://BrownMath.com/