There are two general kinds of entries that should be in the ledger:

It is suggested that the work be divided to make it easier and not overload one person. For example, it is probably best for the budget entries (#1) to be made by the treasurer and the transaction entries (#2) to be made by the card holder (or the treasurer if a non-card transaction). It is also a reasonable and good idea to encourage any contributor to submit a PR with the entries for ticket approvals if you have that capacity.

The goal is to have accurate timely records that are easily maintained by a large group of people.

Swag is budgeted for (#1) and then purchased (#2). If your region buys swag in large quantities and then distributes it across multiple events, it is not necessary for the ledger files to show how much swag went to each event (unless that is useful for you). From a Fedora Project perspective we just need to know how much we budgeted for Swag and how much we spent.

It is also not necessary to break out bank fees like Paypal, however it is strongly encouraged that you do it. This will allow us to edit these fees and see if we can get some lower cost options where it is possible or alternatives from accounting. If you don’t want to break out those fees though, you are not required to do so.

Ledger has very few formatting requirements. For consistency we have adopted the following formatting:

Note: Amounts are not required to be aligned vertically. Amounts are required to be in US Dollars and must be of the form $###. If there are fractions of a dollar that must be separated with a . (period/dot) as the decimal separator and not a , (comma).

This is what is often term "double entry accounting lite." It uses most of the concepts of double entry accounting but doesn’t explicity state debits and credits. Instead, think of the negative sign and implied positive signs as replacing the debit and credit concept.

However, you don’t have to understand double entry account or debits and credits to use this system. The only things you need to know are:

The Fedora project is mostly funded by Red Hat. As part of our support, Red Hat provides us with some credit cards to use. We have to report all of our expenses to Red Hat as one of a very small set of categories. Therefore we have restricted all expenses to these categories. If we find that we need to track other things, we will begin to do so. Start a conversation via an Issue in this repository or on our mailing list, budget-devel@fedoraproject.org.

The categories are:

We are allowed to have further levels of expense categories if we would like. As an example, it would be nice to track our costs of paying reimbursements. Therefore, we can add a :Paypal Fees to each of the above categories to track this. For example:

This could be done to differentiate between types of transportation (Expense:Transportation:Air vs Expense:Transportation:Train) if a region saw value in analyzing that data.

In LATAM transactions will be coded with an extra tag to support regional level reporting. This tag is only required for LATAM but shows how regional level differentiation can be supported. For LATAM, please add a country tag such as:

The Fedora Project doesn’t take in a lot of money as most of our activities are free. Therefore anything that doesn’t fall into the above categories should be entered and processed directly by the FCAIC.