Financial Service Poll

Are you operating a service that is capable of receiving and keeping track of L$ deposits from users? Examples of this would include currency exchanges, banks, S&Ls, Web sites where users must deposit L$ prior to making purchases, vendor systems that retain sales revenue before delivering it to merchants, etc.

This poll does not apply to systems in which a vendor delivers product directly to the customer the moment payment is received, with revenue going directly to the owner - in other words, if it doesn't support the concept of accounts, or you just have objects for sale without any vendor at all, I'm not asking about it.

I am conducting this poll in order to get an idea of what the financial landscape looks like for those who are providing services that A) are more advanced than simple for-sale items and/or vendors, and B) to see how far people are going with things like accounting practices and general knowledge of federal laws concerning accounting (this probably applies to currency changers only, but it's a grey area.)

Feel free to elaborate on the options you select, and please let me know if any of the questions are not clear.

BTW, when I say "Accounting System" I mean something that keeps track of transactions, rather than just keeping a running total without any history.

If you are offering only anonymous certificates that can be redeemed for L$, consider it a "yes" for the purposes of this poll (i.e. I am interested in seeing your response about it here.) Reason: It holds money for someone else, even if the balance is tied to a certificate rather than a username.

At GOM we have a home-rolled accounting system that keeps very detailed information on all transactions. It's not an official double-entry system but that is currently changing.

For our FY04 taxes, I'm collecting all of our accounting info offline into a double-entry system. This information will eventually be dumped into the new web-based DE system when it is complete - probably summertime?

My off-site accounting unfortunately is all done in Excel. I need multi-currency double-entry accounting and it turns out that that's hard to get. I even went so far as to dump many hundreds of dollars on QuickBooks which claims to do multi-currency, but unfortunately only allows it on certain account types.

Zep

SLboutique.com uses a financial transactions table. Each row within the table represents a transaction with a "from" and a "to" column. For example, when a deposit occurs, the "from" would be the user's avatar in Second Life, and the "to" would be the user's SLboutique.com account. Vice versa for withdrawals. When an item is sold, the transfer of funds occurs "from" the buyer "to" the seller. When a commission occurs, it goes "from" the seller who just got the sales monies to the account set up to receive commissions.

So, on SLboutique, a sale is really three monetary transactions and a product transfer:

(1) money from the buyer to the seller
(2) money from the seller to SLboutique (where applicable; commission)
(3) money from the seller to their Second Life Account
(4) object from the seller's in world object to the buyer

All four are done in real time on SLboutique.com. This is one of our fun advantages, I believe, even though its not that big a deal. I've just always found it fun to hear the "cha-ching!" in world when you make a sale, and that happens when a sale occurs on SLboutique in the form of a payment from our SLboutique "bank account", Commerce Leader to the seller in real-time.

Keeping a detailed record of every transaction is crucial, just in case the need ever arises to track down a problem. Our record on deposits thus far has been flawless; when a user has not correctly created an account or linked an avatar, and makes a deposit, an exception has always been kicked to my BlackBerry immediately. Compared to the Second Life account history, we're still 5 by 5. I know there are certain bugs in SL with finances out there (Hi eltee!), but so far, so good.

Jamie, I know you've experienced some of these bugs... can you share what has happened in some of these cases, outside of the PayPal nightmares we all know an loathe?

I hope this helps you out understanding how it all works! Feel free to contact me with any more questions.

Regards,

-Flip

Can you be more specific? Bugs in the SL account details page you mean?

Zep