Financial issueshttps://lab.civicrm.org/dev/financial/-/issues2022-08-25T21:31:40Zhttps://lab.civicrm.org/dev/financial/-/issues/205CiviFinancial Blue Sky Dreaming2022-08-25T21:31:40ZJoeMurrayCiviFinancial Blue Sky DreamingThere has been talk over the years by different people about a LExIM shift to a new paradigm/implementation for CiviAccount. I have been approached by someone who could rustle up a tiny starting stake for such a huge effort (I'm not conf...There has been talk over the years by different people about a LExIM shift to a new paradigm/implementation for CiviAccount. I have been approached by someone who could rustle up a tiny starting stake for such a huge effort (I'm not confident there would be an ability to get to 50% needed to launch an MIH that will likely cost in the six figures at CT billable rates). Here is a blue sky dreaming of how a CiviFinancials LExIM might succeed.
1. We find funding for integrating payments into Form Builder - this seems likely to be possible and occur, yet is still a big lift. Imagine all the financial aspects of webform_civicrm.
2. When implementing the new interface for contribution pages and event reg pages, etc., we have some 'dependency injection' that allows calls to be made either to the existing financial APIs or to a new set.
3. We work to implement the guts of CiviAccounting in a new way. Discussion is needed here, but I would be in favour of some significant breaking changes like simplifying the Financial Type/Financial Account model into much more standard accounting, preferrably with simple, sensible defaults.
1. We could design our own CiviAccounts v2 from scratch.
2. We could aim to implement an interface with an existing open source accounting system. The aim is to store all the CiviCRM financial transactions in a standard, validated way without having the development and support burden of making it ourselves. We'd only need to keep the integration going strong. Two candidates I have found that might be feasible, and there are many others, are Front Accounting and GnuCash. https://sourceforge.net/projects/frontaccounting/files/FrontAccounting%202.4/stats/timeline?dates=2019-08-01+to+2022-08-01 has the same technical stack as CiviCRM (PHP and MySQL) but seems to be trending down in installs. https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files/gnucash%20%28stable%29/stats/timeline?dates=2019-08-01+to+2022-08-01 is much more popular and losing momentum more slowly. It is built in C and C++, so it would be more complex to integrate.
3. If there is a fully open source implementation via CiviAccounts v2 or integrating an open source accounting package, then I would be okay with there being integrations with closed source accounting systems that are popular like Xero and QuickBooks Online. I suppose we could allow the existing implementation of CiviAccounts to be the open source option. While more financially realistic, it might be bad for our reputation.