All individuals, organisations, churches, etc, are entered into an OpenPetra installation as partners. Each site uses a separate set of partner IDs, to avoid conflicts when data is exported from one site to another. The OpenPetra functions are organised into a number of inter-linked modules. In addition to the items listed below, each module allows various types of report to be printed, and appropriate data to be exported to other sites.

Most of the functionality has been working fine in the old Petra. Unfortunately, not all functionality has been ported yet to OpenPetra. But if you want to sponsor one functionality or module in particular, let us know!

Contact Management (Partner Module)

• Records names, addresses (current and previous) and other contact details, bank details, relationships, special flags, and data appropriate to the local site.
• Manages the sending of regular publications to be sent to groups of partners, records individual contacts with partners
• Allows printing of labels, form letters (mail-merge), etc. Data can also be exported into a form that can be used in a spreadsheet of word-processor.

Accounting Package (Finance Module)

• Provides a general ledger, gift receipting, accounts payable and budgeting
• Supports transactions in any currency
• Manages transactions between sites (for example transmission of support gifts) through a well-established International Clearing House mechanism for the efficient transfer of funds and minimisation of currency exchange charges.
• We plan to implement an invoicing system as well, to be able to issue invoices to guests or customers of a book shop etc.

Sponsorship Module

• Records all required data for sponsored children. We support multiple categories, eg. in home, home-based, boarding school, and children that have grown up and left.
• Manages the sponsors for each child. We support multiple sponsors per child: One sponsor can sponsor the education, the other sponsors the general living expenses.
• Support multiple sponsor administrators, to share the work across staff. Each child is assign to one sponsor administrator.

System Manager

• Allows the system administrator to assign access permissions to users, set local parameters (date and number format), set-up printers, etc.