NYCPHP Meetup

[Matt Morgan]

John Lacey wrote:

> Dn. Kirill Sokolov wrote:
>
>>
>> Accounting
>> Donor Management
>> Bookstore (POS)
>> Academic Records / Registrar
>>
>> The glue that holds this all together in a relational database is the 
>> contacts table.
>>
>> I think that for our needs, one of the higher end Quickbooks 
>> applications would do perfectly well for accounting; almost any donor 
>> management program would be fine (e.g., Donorperfect or even the 
>> nonprofitbooks program designed for Quickbooks).  POS and Academic 
>> programs need only to share a contacts database.
>>
>
> look into SQL-Ledger--it's an open source accounting system that uses 
> PostgreSQL -- an Open Source database.  Postgres is a little more work 
> setting up than MySQL (at least in my experience -- feel free to jump 
> in listies).
>
> link to SQL-Ledger:
> http://www.sql-ledger.org/
>
> There will probably be some other folks chiming in here with other 
> suggestions for the other apps.
>
I second the recommendation about SQL-Ledger. Postgres is indeed a bit 
harder to set up then MySQL, although there are packages for all the big 
Linux distributions. It just seems like I always end up having to 
compile it for some reason, or at least edit something manually. But it 
is still better than MySQL in some ways, so it can be worth it.

I suggest a look at dotLRN (http://dotlrn.org/) for open-source academic 
management. It doesn't do everything you need out of the box, but it's 
based on OpenACS (http://www.openacs.org), which is very, very powerful.

--Matt