View source for Financial Software/Meeting Notes for 2016-08-15

: (Go to [[NPSA Past Events]])
: Event notice: https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/232234165/
: Meeting notes: https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/messages/boards/thread/50064445
<span style="font-size:x-large;">'''Financial Software'''

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* What financial software does your organization use?
* How do you migrate between software?
* What considerations do you factor in?
* How do you support this software?

=== Announcements ===

* Upcoming meetings? Fold the group?
** Free software for nonprofits

* What do we want out of the group?
** Proselytize free software? How do we get others to adopt free software? 
** What makes people use free software vs proprietary?
* Hiring policies. Windows people are replacable?

* Recruitment drive?

=== Financial Software ===

* It was difficult to get accounting software for Linux without paying a fortune.

* We should be concerned about financial software
** Writing different interfaces (eg for batch jobs) is difficult

* Sysadmins usually do not decide this software. Accountants do.
** There are specific needs for payroll, HST, auditing
** There is a high learning curve

* Brendan uses SAGE because of payroll
** Quickbooks requires a service to deal with payroll
** Personally Brendan uses GNUCash

* NewViews
** hierarchical accounting that looks like a spreadsheet
** It was made for DOS and Windows
** It has a high learning curve
** TWC moved from the DOS version to Windows

* People at banks prefer correctness over efficiency

* Brendan keeps tracks of accounts for several nonprofits
** They were both using some ancient DOS program
** They migrated their infrastructure to Access databases
** They have multiple systems that have to manually reconcile things?!!!??!!?!!

* It is possible to use TeX as an accounting system
** With spreadsheets as input
** Who else maintains this?

* Why can't some Drupally solution come in and take over this space?
** There are consulting companies: eg http://www.parit.ca/

* The core of financial software are:
** Sales
** Financial transactions
** Different accounts

* The non-cores: 
** Reports to funders
** Payroll

* (ObTopic) Is the cloud going to eat everyone's lunch?
** Freshbooks is on all the podcasts

* Integrating with banks is not so easy with GNUCash
** You also have to make sure the cheques have been written correctly

* How about hledger/ledger?
** https://gitlab.com/egh/ledger-autosync
** http://captin411.github.io/ofxclient/

* Why can't this all be federated?
** IIF : Intuit Interchange Format (proprietary)
** OFX : open standard used by Microsoft Money : http://www.ofx.net/
* Not an API thing?


* Companies vary in what their expenses are and their categories?

* In publishing: 
** There is some key information in invoices
** People need to respond to invoices from printers
** Different industries have come up with their own standards (EDI)
** EDI: Electonic Data Interchange
* Used for Business to Business transactions
** Banks have worked out how to exhange data amongst themselves

* In libraries: somebody wrote http://www.libraryelf.com/Default.aspx that requires you to give your credentials, and it tells you when your books are due.

* Companies decide WHEN to pay invoices to maximize their cash flows
** If you pay early then maybe you get a discount
** Can computers help with some of these problems?
** You favour certain relationships over others

* Quickbooks works under Linux using WINE?


* Studio Tax and UFile will work for tax returns in WINE
** http://studiotax.com/en/


=== Considerations ===

* What people know
** People like their Word and Excel
** Migration costs are very high -- there has to be lots of benefit


* There are a bunch of updates to payroll and HST
** The software is always under development

* Upgrade costs are very high -- once you make a choice you are kind of stuck

* Accounting software needs to be customized to the particular needs of the organization

* Internal formatting is different from reports
** If internal structure is good then maybe making add-ons is feasible

* Humans will have to input most of the transactions?
** But there are point of sales
** Accountants need to verify the receipts
** Robust interfaces are important to avoid input errors

* Can the bookkeepers use the software?
* Does the software interface with the services (ADP) that the organization uses?

* What are the security implications of data breaches? 
** Information leakage about things?
** Corporate surveillance? Future products?
** Know what your prices are?
** Know what different employees are paid?
** Medical/dental data

* Maybe you can't have plugins because that has the potential of violating integrity
** Can't proper transaction logging fix this?


* You close books at the end of the fiscal year
** This freezes accounts

* https://sfconservancy.org/npoacct/

=== Migration ===

* Take an end of year fiscal snapshot
* Move the summary to the new program

* Quickbooks will let you upload your desktop information to the cloud
** But you can't get the data back!
** Maybe the competitors will let you upload to THEIR clouds
** But Quickbooks does not support backwards compatibility on the desktop either