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Beginning of general description of using Ledger CLI for fiscal sponsorship accounts.

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Bradley M. Kuhn 2013-04-21 15:41:32 -04:00
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npo-ledger-cli-tutorial.md
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@ -108,6 +108,37 @@ ignored. (For example, if your organization simplified its chart of accounts
in later years, you don't want to report those old accounts that are no
longer used.)
Handling Fiscal Sponsorship
---------------------------
NPOs that do not provide fiscal sponsorship services will find this section
somewhat useless. One of the biggest benefits of Ledger CLI is its
incredible flexibility that just does not exist in other accounting systems.
This section describes how to exploit that flexibility to provide a
separation in your books and reporting to handle earmarked accounts for
fiscally sponsored projects.
NPOs that don't need this feature can, in most cases, use the methods
described herein to deploy Ledger CLI, but should leave out the `:General:`
and `:ProjectNAME:` parts of the account hierarchy, since these are the
primary mechanisms used herein to handle the fiscal sponsorship structure.
### Earmarked Accounts
Many fiscal sponsor NPOs keep earmarked accounts for their member/affiliated
projects. Furthermore, these projects often may either (a) terminate their
agreement with the NPO, and thus deserve a copy of their books that they can
"take away" with them, or (b) might be affiliated with *other* NPOs that also
hold accounts. This system of earmarked accounts is designed to make it easy
for projects to have a copy of their own accounts, but not interfere with nor
even be aware of (a) the books of other member/affiliated projects, and (b)
the overall books of the entire NPO.
On the latter point, this system utilizes a directory structure and separate
`.ledger` files to separate out the different projects into different
structures. This allows member/affiliated projects to take their data and
run `ledger` commands against it, separately and without access to the other
`.ledger` files of the NPO.
Copyright and License of This File
----------------------------------