Care and transparency.

Alongside our commitment to animal welfare, our board members work professionally in information security and quality management. So it was clear to us that Aluna had to be organised from day one just as soundly and traceably as we are used to in our working lives.

You can do that with spreadsheets, folders and good intentions. But to keep it traceable and transparent at all times, two things help above all: reliable processes, and tools that support us in following them.

Aluna Kompass

Because we needed a tool that does exactly that for a small association, we built one. Aluna Kompass is the one application in which every matter of the association is created and kept: the website you are reading right now, the correspondence, the bookings, the receipts, the resolutions, the file of every dog from the shelter to the follow-up visit.

The principle behind it: every transaction is recorded exactly once, at the point where it occurs, and never retyped or filed away afterwards. Nothing that matters for accountability is ever deleted — every change is logged with user and time. From this record, Kompass produces what the association owes to the outside world: the annual report, the documents for the audit of accounts, donation receipts, minutes, filings with the register and the tax office.

Data protection matters greatly to us as well. For every contact, Kompass knows the statutory retention period, calculates from it when personal data becomes due for deletion, and puts it to a person for confirmation. What must be deleted is not forgotten; what must be retained is not removed prematurely. The record of processing activities the GDPR requires comes from the same data.

For you as a donor this means: what happens to your money is in the books from the start, not reconstructed at the end of the year. From that come our annual report and the documents for the audit of accounts, where you can read what the donations were used for.

Open to other associations

The obligations we have apply to every non-profit association. We believe associations should learn from one another rather than each reinvent the wheel. What makes our work easier should be open to others too. That is why publishing Kompass as open source was never a question for us but a matter of course: anyone who wants to use, review or develop the software further will find it at github.com/DigiJoe79/Aluna-Kompass.

One thing matters to us here: not a cent of donations or membership fees goes into developing Kompass. It is volunteer work by people from the association, in their spare time and at their own expense. Every donation to Aluna goes to animal welfare.