> This did come up in our discussions, yes, and they did have a few
> reasons for not wanting to do it this way. One, they like the
> security of having the detailed donations list redundantly
> stored.
That is what backups are for. If there are two places to enter it, I can
almost guarentee that some will get entered only one place.
With only one, some will get missed entirely but those people will probably
complain because they never hear from you again.
>Two, they do fund accounting, which means that
> time-based batch accounting won't work for them.
Nonsense, if you run the batchs every day and use even the rudimentary
facilities built into Ebase of account codes and entities. This makes it
easy to separate the transactions by fund and account within fund. It should
not make any difference if you summarize the days results, 20 new members at
$20 each and 30 donations totally $300. The business decisions are going to
get made based on the ebase records of a person giving history. The only one
who looks at the QB data is the auditor and the board who should only be
looking at monthly summaries at best.
> They could, of
> course, aggregate by fund, but I think in many cases that this
> would leave them with almost as much detail as if they just
> imported transactions. It would also mean that the Ebase data
> entrant (is that a word? there needs to be one if that's not
> it..) would have to get all of the fund numbers right, because
> the accountant would not be able to verify the fund on a
> check-by-check basis.
>
Accountants never verify on a check-by-check basis. At best they sample. If
the real information resides on the ebase side then the accountant has to
learn or be shown enough ebase to answer their questions. Besides which the
check only shows that they paid $100, not that $20 of it was for membership
and $80 a donation. You need to look at the order form to verify and the
check and all the databases where the information is stored to really verify
it.
Accounts are well aware that some percentage of stuff will wind up in the
wrong accounts.
Before retiring I worked for IBM. At one point they excessed most of the
accountants and gave each person a table of account codes to use when they
bought things, essentially making everyone a poorly trained bookkeeper. I am
sure I put in some wrong codes. I once asked one of the remaining
accountants about what effect it would have. They said the stuff I bought
cost at most a few hundred. They round to the nearest million so it makes no
difference what I do. If you make a big error where it shows, the
accountants will notice it. If you make lots of small random errors they
probably won't notice it.
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