also sprach martin f krafft <madduck@debconf.org> [2015-05-07 21:46 +0200]: > There's already an overview page designed to produce a quick-n-easy > PDF for the salient information. I don't think it makes sense to > just distill everything from the current file into a PDF. What would > help is knowing what information you'd want in such a snapshot. > > - the overview? > - the detailed expense listing? > - what else? Having given this quite a bit of thought in the last few weeks, here's a proposal which I believe is a good way forward: The planing/preparation/design of the budget should be done using whatever tool seems most appropriate. As much as I hate GUI-based tools and spreadsheets and while they make it difficult to quickly inspect things or investigate changes over time, I have not found a better tool. However, for budget approval, I propose that the numbers be entered into ledger (which we already use for accounting; http://ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html), using so-called virtual postings, e.g. 2015-02-28 * Load budget (budget:fees:registration) 25 EUR (budget:outreach:press) 1000 EUR (budget:swag:tshirts) 5600 EUR […] A "budget" would then be such a stanza with a line for every expense category. Whenever the budget is amended, the ledger will be updated, so as to keep track of changes as they get approved. For instance, if a month later, we decided to extend the registration fees budget, one would write: 2015-03-28 * Extend registration budget ; msgid:<foobar@example.org> (a comment with a message ID…) (budget:fees:registration) 25 EUR and the 25 EUR would be added to the already budgeted 25 EUR (see above). At any point in time, the ledger tool can be used to query all such postings, as well as get totals for the individual accounts. And it's text-based, in Git, which should allow for all other kinds of analysis/processing. This approach has the benefit of later allowing us to book expenses directly against budget, e.g. (using our first actual expense as example) 2014-06-24 * (2014-06-24-0001) Notary charges for registration expenses:non-profit:other 20,00 EUR liabilities:members -23,80 EUR assets:vat_deductable_19p:non-profit 3,80 EUR (budget:fees:registration) -23,80 EUR Henceforth, the budget:fees:registration account would show the balance, allowing for all kinds of queries and alarms: % ./wrapper bal \^budget 26,20 EUR budget:fees:registration […] % ./wrapper reg \^budget 2015-02-28 Load budget (budget:fees:registration) 25,00 EUR 25,00 EUR 2015-03-28 Extend registration budget (budget:fees:registration) 25,00 EUR 50,00 EUR 2014-06-24 Notary charges for registration (budget:fees:registration) -23,80 EUR 26,20 EUR How does this sound? I'll be importing the latest approved budget into ledger one of these days, because it'll be useful to me. If this is a process you'd be willing to try going forward, then we could use this process for the next budget approval(s). -- .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debconf.org> @martinkrafft : :' : DebConf orga team `. `'` `- DebConf15: Heidelberg, Germany: http://debconf15.debconf.org DebConf16: Cape Town: https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf16
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