At 11:50 PM 8/30/01 -0400, you wrote:
>
>> 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.
I didn't say I like the redundancy. Part of the problem is also simply that their QBP
is currently set up to record items check-by-check, and not everything will go through
Ebase - since not every check they get is Fundraising related (which is what they want
their Ebase to focus on.) So to switch over to just accounting by aggregate amounts
in each fund would require a bunch of work within QBP which they don't want to deal
with. They just want Ebase to be able to spit out data that they can use in place of
their current redundant data entry - but which will provide the same info as that DE.
Re: your IBM story: good story. However, this is a small non-profit. They don't
round by millions. In fact, they watch every check. They're not willing to have one
slide through the cracks and not get acknowledged. I think they are thinking that the
accountant would monitor check-by-check. Again, still faster than having to do all
that data entry.
Matt
>
>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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