The finance committee has determined that our best use of time is to hire some expert setup guidance from an actual QuickBooks Pro Advisor. We can hire a local QB pro with lots of experience in Non-Profits using QB for $55 / hour. Her estimate for the time needed is 2 to 5 hours. Rounding up to $300 will cover contingencies.
Once we get past the set up we can maintain QB.
I vote YES
I vote YES
JimD
Yes
I vote Yes.
Quickbooks is one of the most heinous pieces of software I’ve had to deal with on a somewhat regular basis. It is also ubiquitous. I assume alternatives have been explored? It always seems like quickbooks is the best piece of shit software there is for smaller organizations.
-D
QB wins the software selection. It is widely used, flexible and discounted to nonprofits through TechSoup.
I suspect that one of the more heinous aspects of QB is double entry bookkeeping.
It seems to be an offence to engineering efficiency, but is really a way to assure error free accounting.
At issue is the flexibility of QB and the best way to transition from excel to QB, including a chart of accounts.
My issues with Quickbooks are primarily architectural/IT/supporting it. It’s heinous as a shared application. Having multiple people at different locations interacting with the same dataset is challenging. its flat file database limits scalability in multiple user situations severely. It’s built like it was 2001 not 2021. As long as people are always working on finances on one PC and not trying to collaborate or work on things independently, it’s fine.
this is my experience supporting my CPAs who use both “normal” Quickbooks (for liaising with clients) and Quickbooks Pro Series (internally).
-Dave
We have a 5 user QB online version which supports online integration. Seemingly solving many of those issues. I did explore QB desktop and rejected it for your reasons.
I vote yes.
Who is on the finance committee? I found this page which mentions committees but does not list them or their members.
John
John, Not to dodge the question, but the action is on SLACK at #finance.
Committees are still in their infancy. During the last board meeting we initiated the following committees:
Since we are still working on starting up the committees a lot of documentation still needs to be done. Thanks for pointing out the Governance page, that will go on the list of pages to update.
At this time, the home page for the wiki ( https://wiki.hive13.org/view/Main_Page ) has a new section heading labeled ‘Committees’ with links to pages for each committee. Again, these committees were just launched and many of the pages are just rough drafts at this point. Ideally, I would like it if eventually each committee had a full documentation of its members on those wiki pages, but that has not been done yet.
I know the Outreach committee discussions can be found in the #outreach slack channel and finance is in #finance. I am not aware if the ‘Operations’ or ‘Technology’ have dedicated slack channels at this time.
yes
I vote YES on this with the faith/expectation that this will lead quickly to a true implementation of QB to manage our finances and that there will be a demonstration to the membership (Tuesday talk?) to show how we are using it and what benefit it brings us.
YES
I vote yes.
I vote yes
Yes.
Thank you,
Rob
yes
-Drew Weller
John Clark wrote: “This is a large amount of money and from what I have seen in the finance committee, finances are a lot tighter than the Open Finance part of our website would indicate. We may have to cut back on some other things to do this. But I think it’s worth it from a safety standpoint.”
This is exactly what I am hoping that our QuickBooks implementation will address. We need to be able to have accurate, transparent, real-time and forecast views of our finances. We are playing fast and loose with votes right now and our members are counting on our financial reports to be in order in order to make their decisions. It’s not cool to assure prospective voters that we can afford something based on stale and incomplete data when the finance committee themselves are saying that the picture isn’t that rosy. The Quickbooks implementation MUST bridge this gap.