[haiku-bugs] Re: [Haiku] #11154: Fundraising status is out of date.
- From: "leavengood" <trac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 04:01:24 -0000
#11154: Fundraising status is out of date.
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Reporter: bbjimmy | Owner: haiku-web
Type: bug | Status: closed
Priority: normal | Milestone:
Component: Website/CMS | Version:
Resolution: fixed | Keywords:
Blocked By: | Blocking:
Has a Patch: 0 | Platform: All
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Comment (by leavengood):
So I've been looking into sorting out the Haiku, Inc financials and
automating it as much as possible.
Mostly our donations come in through PayPal. Currently we manually
download a CSV file from PayPal, but the PayPal CSV file is pretty
complicated. There are 41 fields, some of the transactions don't actually
affect the balance which means they need to be ignored, we have multiple
types of donations, different things we pay out, multiple currencies (at
least USD and EUR but also more when we pay out expenses which need to be
converted), occasional refunds, and probably other things I'm not thinking
about.
Fortunately I think I've got a handle on it finally and I have some code
which can take the PayPal CSV file and produce a file which is readable by
the command-line accounting system [http://ledger-cli.org Ledger].
Everything seems to add up correctly in these Ledger files.
Of course while this is fine and dandy for financial reports or for
occasionally updating the donation meter, having to manually download a
CSV file is not a solution for having daily updates to the donations,
which I agree would be nice to have.
Fortunately PayPal does have an
[https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/api/merchant/TransactionSearch_API_Operation_SOAP/
API to download transaction data], and I will look into using that. My
existing code could simply build a Ledger file from the API and then we
could use that for more frequent donation meter updates (or we might not
even need Ledger for this.)
Unfortunately as mentioned we also have other sources of donations, so a
"complete" solution is a bit more complicated. I'm sure Amazon Payments
has an API to download transactions but I haven't looked for it yet. But a
"mostly accurate" meter that is updated more frequently is better than a
"perfect" one updated once a month (or less.) It is not like it is a
financial report, which I ensure are perfect to the penny.
Fortunately the bank isn't used much for donations besides the occasional
check so I don't think it is an issue for this purpose.
Besides the issue in this bug about updating the donation meter we are
terribly behind on our financials reports and that is pretty much all my
fault. I think I'm finally over the hump in fixing all that though because
of finally cracking the PayPal problem and I hope to get completely caught
up within a week or two.
Once that is done I'll see about automating the donation meter as
described here.
--
Ticket URL: <https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/11154#comment:15>
Haiku <https://dev.haiku-os.org>
Haiku - the operating system.
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