The LinkedIn Blog: The Engineering component | LinkedIn Company Profiles

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Colligo Reader is free for individual use and a great way to try the rich offline experience that Colligo for SharePoint delivers. Reader provides read-only access to SharePoint content offline, including documents, lists, and metadata. It is so simple to use that training is not required. Download Colligo Reader for free today!

Source: Colligo Reader and Contributor – Your Offline SharePoint Solution

The good news is that our board is asking me questions. The bad news is that I do not always have the answer on the tip of my tongue and I need to look it up. For the last year I had been bringing my laptop to the meetings so that I could answer those unexpected questions. About two months ago our nonprofit moved their board meeting to an offsite location. It is a nice conference room in a good location but it does not have public Wi-Fi access. This is where Colligo Reader has been a great help. I store all of my nonprofit reports, letters, and worksheets in a Sharepoint site I run. Before I go to the meeting I let Colligo synchronize the files. This is a great solution for the mobile workforce and especially for those people trying to keep their nonprofit work from consuming the rest of the day.

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3. Marion Conway—Consultant to Nonprofit’s writes about, “Accountability and Transparency for nonprofits” and references Guidestar’s Accountability and Transparency article.

Source: Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants #38-Nonprofit Management and Leadership | Aspiration

I followed this jewel this morning and ended up at Guidestar.org site reading their article, Paper-Thin Transparency. In that article Guidestar defines transparency as:

At GuideStar, we think transparency means answering these questions for donors and funders:

1. Is this a legitimate 501(c)(3) nonprofit?
2. What social impact will my donation have?
3. How fiscally responsible is this organization?
4. What are this organization’s goals and intentions?

Effective means that address these questions are to state publicly, clearly, and concisely your mission, annual accomplishments, ways you measure success, and goals.

Recently the nonprofit I volunteer at has been trying to articulate these goals in writing. Some large donors are particularly interested in this information. Unfortunately this effort drops down on the priority list for the working board members as the problems of running the nonprofit bubble up to the top of the list.  The hard part is documenting the social impact. The words are easy to write.

Once you have words to say, a small part of the problem is making the data available to the public. The folks at Guidestar have a simple, low cost solution, eDocs Service. For a $35 annual fee you can keep upload:

• Letter of Determination or Advance Ruling
• Audited or Reviewed Financial Statement
• Annual Report
• Form 990(current)

This service looks pretty handy for large and small donors and the fee is nominal. I noticed that the latest 990 for my nonprofit at Guidestar is for 2003. That won’t do!

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For a Habitat affiliate the most important cash flows, mortgages receivable, home owner principal payments and construction costs, are asset accounts and do not appear on the income statement. As a result a “useful” budget for a Habitat affiliate must establish goals not only for the income and expense accounts but for the mortgage receivable, construction in process, and land inventory accounts. The first time I made a budget I “winged” it in this area because the construction plan was not available. I knew this was important information but you cannot budget items you do not have a plan for. Since then I have convinced most of the board on the importance of this part of the planning process. Our cash situation is much tighter than two years ago so there considerably less wiggle room. The board placed a much higher priority on planning and executing the plan when I told them we did not have the money.

The budget is almost complete for this year. I modeled the format of the budget on the existing QuickBooks Income and Cash Flow statements. I did re-arrange the Cash Flow statement to highlight the essentials, fund raising/operating costs, home owner principal payments, and construction expenditures. I am going to use spreadsheets to create future financial statements for future time periods that look a lot like the existing statements. Although there are existing budget reports in QuickBooks, they do not model the cash flow adequately. Although I loathe to use reports outside of QuickBooks because it will take additional time on my part, the budget reports in QuickBooks do not do the job for us because of our cash flow forecasting needs.

I used this tutorial, Tutorial: Modeling and What if? analysis with pivot tables – 20 Jul 2006 , on pivot tables to provide me with an easier to use mechanism to summarize data. Basically I have a row with monthly values for all of the pertinent accounts I need to reconstruct the income and cash flow statements. I started off by modeling the first nine months of this fiscal year and making sure it matched existing accounting reports. Then I added three more rows for the last quarter and estimated the values. We should have a good cash forecast for the fiscal year end. My final trick is to model a minimal balance statement.

Putting together a construction plan for the next fiscal year is going to be difficult since the construction/fund raising plan is still in a state of flux. We have land we do not want to build on and land we cannot build on without significant capital improvements. This probably means we need to buy additional lots. The best I can do is guess on the plan. This should be beneficial to the board since they tend to focus best when I give them construction start and finish dates. By tying together the fund raising plan to our construction plan via the cash flow statement, the board should keep focused on the key issues.

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More Resources from Kivi: How to Write a Nonprofit Annual Report – A Four-Week E-Course You Can Start Today

Link to Carnival #33: Communicating with Donors

The BusinessBlogWire pointed me at this site via their Blogtipping roundup. Kivi has some excellent nonprofit advice on her site. As Treasurer for a nonprofit I was modestly interested in her advice on how to write a nonprofit annual report. Our Development Director had mentioned he was interested in writing an annual report a couple of months ago. I liked the idea but loathed the fact that it would involve a lot of my time since I was the custodian of information. As Treasurer my plate has been overflowing for several months. My workload has forced me to beg off of strategic plan meetings even though I have a vested interest that this strategic plan be a plan that can be implemented. Strategic plans and annual reports go hand in hand. It is hard to plan for success if you do not keep score.

My problem with strategic plans is that board members try to be so nice. They never seem to say a bad word about strategic plans they think are unrealistic. In their hearts they want to be wrong and the strategic plan to work. Their dilemma is that they already know that there are plenty of situations that will cause them to say and act differently than where the strategic plan is pointing them. The words they speak and the actions they take will not mimic the hope in their heart. Breaking this status quo is the grand challenge.

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Publish any Windows application onto remote desktops and save on administration & support

With 2X ApplicationServer for Windows Terminal Services companies can reap the benefits of thin client computing without having to switch the network infrastructure to a thin client OS.

Rather than deploying particular windows applications onto all your desktops, resulting in an administration and support nightmare, install the application on one central server and use 2X ApplicationServer for Windows Terminal Services to seamlessly publish the application onto remote desktops.

Users will never know that the application is running remotely and you will be able to manage the application from a single location! Transmitting just the screen updates rather than the client server data is often faster too.

2X ApplicationServer features:

• Publish applications, rather than installing locally
• Tunnel an application, not a whole desktop
• Seamless integration with local desktop & taskbar
• Publish applications based on username, group membership or IP
• Publish Windows applications onto Linux   and Mac
• Publish applications to Web Interface (Windows clients only)
• Publish applications to a terminal server farm
• Integration with 2X LoadBalancer
• SSL secure connection to Applications

Get your FREE 5 application edition of 2X ApplicationServer now! Free perpetual license!

Source: Application publishing: 2X ApplicationServer for Windows Terminal Services

The part that really got my attention was the free 5 user ApplicationServer. A person in one of the newsgroups mentioned that they were using it. I installed the ApplicationServer this week and am testing it with QuickBooks 2004 on an old W2K server. It seems to work fine. Its pricing for a larger numbers of users is pretty decent, too. I was putting together a terminal server quote for a small nonprofit. The have several Win98 computers they are gradually replacing with Win2K vintage computers. The non-profit pricing for the terminal server licenses via Techsoup was pretty low, $50 for the W2K3 server and 5 clients plus $30 for 5 terminal server clients. Combine these licenses with an entry level server and we have a nice manageable application platform that is practically independent of the workstations.

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As the Treasurer for the last couple of years I have been keenly interested in making our affiliate make better operational and strategic decisions. Charities are competing for the same funds and volunteers. Donors and volunteers are expecting a better experience for their time and money. They can make a different choice. I do not think I am stretching things too much when I compare a charity’s donors and volunteers to a small business’s customers. A charity has key performance indicators and line of business(LOB) activities that are very much like a small business. Making timely operational and strategic decisions is key to survival. With a geographically dispersed workforce this decision making process becomes more difficult. The areas of improvement I feel there is the most potential for are:

• Improve collaboration amongst the board of directors members.
  1. Collect committee reports in one location.
  2. Access a common schedule for meetings and other key events.
  3. Keep track of committee’s monthly objectives.
• Identify and report on key indicators.
  1. Construction status by house/project
  2. Donation status by house/campaign
  3. Mortgage/Delinquency status
  4. Partner family application status
• Improve operation
  1. Track employee hours.
  2. Track expense account forms.
  3. LOB activities reporting and approvals.

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Design Decisions

1. My favorite blog software is WordPress.
2. WordPress is generally available at most host providers and has lots of free themes to choose from.
3. WordPress does not have licensing issues.
4. I envision that most of the updates will be via posts. We need an easy method of posting with photos by non-Geeks. The ability to use multiple authors is a plus.
5. We will need about six static pages(e.g. Volunteer, Donation, Family Selection, etc.). These will be updated quarterly to annually.

Implementation Decisions

The key for me was seeing the themes available at themes.wordpress.net. After browsing through a part of this immense collection I settled on MistyLook from the creators of WordPress Garden. It has a nice, clean, widget friendly, two column design with tabs across the top of the page for the static pages. Only the key pages are shown across the top. All of the static pages appear in the sidebar, too. I already have a widget template for Paypal donations. I don’t expect many PayPal donations but it will be easier and it requires almost no effort on our part to collect the money. The only drawback to the theme was that I had to tweak it a little to get it to work.
I added three WordPress plugins:

1. Imagemanager to handle the photos. WordPress’s default features are pretty good but Imagemanager adds resizing and default sizes for thumbnails.
2. Widgets plugin.
3. FeedBurner plugin. RSS feeds are typically associated with a younger crowd. Since we have quite a few older volunteers who have just recently gotten comfortable with email, FeedBurner Email looks like a potential winner for us. Volunteers can get website updates via RSS feeds or Email.

So here is the fruits of my labor.

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My partial solution to this problem is to create about half of the transactions, escrow and late fees, directly from the spreadsheet. In my case I enter QuickBooks invoices for every escrow and late fee payment. The problem is that the escrow and late fees payments change every month. Another problem is that you need to create three rows in an IIF for every payment. In the spreadsheet I use to reconcile the deposits, I use one row per payment. So here is how I solved the problem.

I select the rows I want to generate invoices for and then run an Excel macro that creates a new worksheet in the IIF format with the data from the payments. Then I save the new worksheet as a Tab delimited file with an iif extension and import it into QuickBooks. The logic is pretty simple.

1. You create a new Export worksheet. You delete the old Export worksheet if it exists.
2. For every row in the selection you check to see if was part of a deposit. My worksheet has all of the home owners listed. If a home owner does not make their monthly payment, this cell is empty. If a home owner makes more than one payment in a month I will have two or more rows for them.
3. If it was part of a deposit and the escrow portion is greater than zero, you make an escrow invoice.
4. If it was part of a deposit and the late payment is greater than zero, you make an late fee invoice.

So there it is. Since I track escrow liabilities by home owner, each home owner has their own QuickBooks “Item” that points to their escrow account. I used the “vlookup” command to fill out the invoice with the correct QuickBooks “Item” for each home owner.

The other half of the transactions is the data entered on the Customer Payment screen. Although there is an IIF transaction for customer payment it does not help me. The Bill Payment transaction is not helpful, too. It would be nice to automate this but I will settle for my small improvement in the process.

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