Open accounting

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See also

Wish list -- The user group's wish list.

User group open accounting.

1 Proposal
2 Current Goals
3 Future Goals
4 Accounting History

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Proposal

Open accounting is a concept of having a publically viewable history of transactions. This is especially important in cases where the source of funds is through public donations, since it allows donators to see the past history of the use of donations as well as an updated list of candidates for expendature.

I believe that the open accounting concept would be a useful tool to demonstrate to donators the need and value of their contributions. Furthermore, plainly listing expenses would go a long way towards improving the morale of those asking for donations.

-- Sy / ^(talk) 18:09, 15 May 2005 (EDT)

There is also a bit of a problem with "totally open" accounting, namely that it provides the opportunity for people to "tilt at windmills" and poke at anything that ever happens.

If every transaction is open to everyone, then someone can (and eventually will) discover a way of regarding some transaction as being nigh enough to either fraud or incompetence to cause trouble. "Why did you pay $50 for that package of CD-Rs, possibly from someone somewhat related to someone, when someone was charging $40 that week in Scarborough?"

If your reaction is, "Isn't that small and petty, and why should we worry about that?", that is absolutely the case, and the problem is that the biggest, most painful problems will almost always be about small, stupid, petty things. Which is why publicizing a *summary* is sure to be better.

The contrary question: Why would anyone bother to rummage around in the detailed transactions unless they're trying to find more-or-less fraudulent activity?

  The true purpose of privacy in society, I think, as I 
  heard someone once say (I _think_ it was John Gilmore 
  in some remarks at the first Computers, Freedom and 
  Privacy conference in San Francisco, 1990), is to protect 
  people from being meddled with over things that don't matter.
  -- Kent M Pitman

It seems to me that how the petty cash is dealt with is a matter that doesn't matter terribly much. And "hiding" that in the form of a financial summary does exactly what is described above, namely to protect people from being meddled with over things that don't matter.

-- cbbrowne 2005-09-01

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