It appears to me that ERPNext is not equipped for non-profit Fund Accounting at this juncture. I had noticed a thread that suggested Cost Centers could be used to accomplish this, but that feature will only let you assign Revenue and Expense accounts to a Cost Center. Restricted Funds will have their own assets and bank accounts which exist in their own parallel ledger to the Unrestricted Fund.
In Fund Accounting, there is an Unrestricted Fund, and then there exist Funds that are temporarily restricted and those that are permanently restricted. Structurally, each fund is a stand alone ledger that balances to zero, but the funds are interrelated in that there may be assets that transfer to and from the unrestricted fund. For instance, an item in the temporarily restricted fund may released and available for use for the Unrestricted fund. This entry would entail a pair of entries to mark the asset leaving the temporarily restricted fund and a companion pair showing the asset availability to the unrestricted fund. The non-profit financial statement needs to include all of the funds, but each fund can stand on its own.
I think perhaps I could “clone” the “Accounts” doc-type (perhaps AccountsF) such that these properties would exist. Change the “Cost Centers” tag to Fund and allow the Fund to be associated with any account in the Ledger in order to achieve the required structure/properties of a Fund Accounting system.
I am not at all criticizing ERPNext for this lack of fund accounting, I’m mostly asking it it would make sense to implement by essentially forking the Accounting Module, keeping schemas, but changing the methods and properties to handle the more restrictive Fund Accounting aspects. Within the frappe framework, I think ERPNext has all I need to build what I want, but I’m asking for counsel on the straightest path. Thanks everyone.
