There are many tens of thousands packages available for the Linux OS, can anyone name any Linux (Debian?) package suitable to start a Not-For-Profit (run by non-professionals volunteers in the early stage)?

Beside low cost or no cost, the main attribute we're looking for is simplicity of use and the first priority is on banking/accounting.
Second priority would be content management - if possible at all completely run through HTML FORMS for lots of inexperienced users.

Thank you for your help.

You'll need to clarify with a little more detail about the activities you have planned. But here are some generic guesses:

About the CMS, if I am correct in guessing that you want it for setting up a web presence, the lowest maintenance would be a static site generator like Hugo, Jekyll, or Pelikan. You get web forms for entering new pages and such but the publicly facing material is all static, which means that it loads quickly, has very low system requirements on the server side, and has no moving parts to break or maintain.

About finances, there is KMyMoney, GNU Cash, and Skrooge. If you're really small then LibreOffice Calc or Calligra Sheets. But the only way to know if they meet your needs would be to do a detailed trial run.

As for the main platform, if you are looking at a desktop, I would strongly recommend something more polished like Linux Mint or Ubuntu. They look nice but more importantly have a lot of the little details pre-configured to be useful.

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Yes there are many packages available for Linux.

What have you tried? What are you considering already?

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Have only tried "Gnucash" and it's already too complicated for most of the volunteers, having too many options not used by a tax "self-assessing" unincorporated organisation (under Australian laws).

Discussions and exchanges of ideas about public policies. Education. CMS is mainly about sorting and ranking (or rating) ideas and propositions, not the creation/maintenance of website.

Ok, you might need several: maybe a forum and a wiki and a static site.

For the discussion forums, in no particular order, there could be FUDforum, Simple Machines Forum, and Thredded to name three. I presume that the site and its content will be in English only. Are there any forums that you are already aware of that have the features you would like to have? What you want it to do will be the key factors in which forum software you can choose. For example, LQ does not have threaded discussions, only flat, to identify one option.

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If memory serves, gnucash was intended to mimic Quickbooks and Quicken. One would think that people used to accounting work flows would not have a problem with that.

Most services these days are on the cloud.

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I had contemplated a WIKI of sort altough the existing ones are not exactly what we need.
The site is multilingual and almost ready but a basic understanding of English is assumed from professionals of foreign countries.
The site itself is a WIKI because each line translated from the English version is offered for correction to a native reader/visitor and then submitted to replace the faulty original, the correction is automatically reloaded after a number of checks so the user can see the correction almost in real time.

I realize now that this definition is misleading.
No, there is nothing like it. In short and more precisely, the main activity is for a user to make a professional proposition/correction (regarding any public policy of any country) and others to edit it and to rate it - within a group of professionals. The expectation is to programmatically make the best propositions "bubble up" to the top of a list. And these propositions may apply in more than one list. I had the feeling we might have to write an application ourselves but if that is the case, we'd like to plagiarize whatever existing free software there is doing something similar.


That's true but we may not have enough participants with a background in accounting and willing to do the work of their organisation. In .au, (and probably in many countries) the legal accounting obligation facing unincorporated NFP are minimal, in our case and from memory (I am not an accountant), budgeting, cashflow, accounts payable and accounts receivable are about all we need. We're not allowed to borrow or receive donations or invest, the whole system works on membership fees. It is possible that we could make use of the files created by gnucash and make those files available to workers unfamiliar in accounting, if my recollection is correct these are flat CSV files. and we could create this access through HTML FORMS and then have 1 true accounting person to run gnucash and check the results.

Personally, if I had some-one who couldn't manage Gnucash, I wouldn't let them near my financial records! I don't think keeping the accounts is a job for just anyone. You don't need an accounting background: I use Gnucash for my personal records and I always say I know nothing about money except how to spend it.

If you are looking for software for particular jobs, this is a good place to see what's available
http://linuxappfinder.com/

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This was absolutely where my train of thought was going.

Sadly when I off-times choose to offer that type of opinion, the respondent may say something disabling to my point such as, "I trust them fully even though they are not an accountant, it's my relative."

I'm sure its worldwide, meanwhile here in the US we've seen plenty of corrupt donation organizations, corrupt use of donations which could have been used legally and this was the intent, just that someone embezzled money. Invariably it is the manager of the funds who was identified as the perpetrator.

My point about that latter part is that if I were heading up or a highly involved person in such an organization, I'd want to make sure that all the rules it needed to follow, were being followed.

I ran a personal corporation and upon creating that my meeting with my accountant started with me saying, "I think I can compute payroll taxes, they're only for me as a consultant. However I definitely need your services to ensure that I'm not failing to do anything required of a corporation." He fully understood that, taught me the few steps I needed to follow to compute my taxes when I paid myself, showed me the federal publications that described these processes and explained based upon the amount of money whether or not I'd need to inform him weekly, monthly, or quarterly about my payroll. He did the annual reports and also told me how and where to make my tax payments to ensure that I was not going to get audited and in trouble. All I have from that is that I did it for a few years and absolutely nothing negative ever came from it.

So perhaps that is a recommendation. Involve an accountant as an advisor. Yes they will cost money. Sorry but even non-profit corporations have expenses. In fact the larger they are, the more important that is. I'm sure you, or they, will choose accordingly.

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Yes it is, I've used gnucash for many years and it is similar to, and IMO better then Quickbooks/Quicken. There are youtube tutorials and plenty of material online as well about it.

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Some will volunteer their time depending on the purpose of the non-profit. It looks good for them as well.

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(Doku|Media)Wiki?

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