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

Financial Software

• 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