Accounts

See also Open Accounting

Currency

Problem

We have no income, but we still need to account for the payments that senders send to recipients. All the accounting systems that we could use and adapt to our needs have very few of the features we need and very many that we don’t need.

See Payment System.

Solution

BTCPay Pull Payments

BTCPay Server has a pull payments feature, which seems like it has all we need. We will test it out and add notes here.

Design Our Own System From Scratch

We only use bitcoin. Senders send to recipients in bitcoin either on-chain or via lightning payments. This saves us having to do complex accounting in multiple currencies. The value of bitcoin at any given time is irrelevant; all that matters is

  • How much did the recipient need?
  • How much did they get?

The conversions don’t need to be kept up-to-date because the only time the value of the bitcoin sent matters to the sender and recipient is at the time of sending. Our system is only reporting. Annual totals and other monetary obsessions usually observed in accounting systems are irrelevant to us, so we don’t need to include them. If someone really wants to know, they can do that work themselves.

The design requirements will go on a new page.

System

  • Simple
  • Open to the public
  • Not editable by the public!
  • Protect the identity of the senders
  • Enable any user to identify their own contributions to check that they are not being lied to.
  • In the case of ClickForCharity and Direct Sponsor, users must also be able to see who their money went to and when each transaction happened reflected in the accounts.

For the latter two items, we can give each user an ID number, which only they know. This way they can check the accounts and know for sure that their own part of it is true and accurate. Knowing that all other senders have this same facility helps to ensure and verify there is no fraud. They may not know the other senders’ identities, but they know how many there are and how much they sent.

Possibly Useful Software

This may be redundant if the WordPress custom fields plugin works OK, but leaving it here for reference just in case. It may use less resources.

EtherCalc looks promising. Opensource.com has a review of it. We could create a spreadsheet on their site for free to try it out. Otherwise, there are some other suggestions on this page. I think framicalc is based on it; we could try that out first. I set up a sheet here. The guide is here.