Custom Reports Ready for Testing

Hello ACCOUNTS beta testers. We have finally finished the Custom Reports feature, that I wrote to you earlier about (at https://software4nonprofitsbooks.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/accounts-custom-reporting/).

This is a pretty major feature, and the programming was pretty complex, so we would really appreciate it if as many of you as possible could give it a try and let us know what you think – especially if you run into any problems with it, incorrect results etc.!

As mentioned in that previous post, with Custom Reports you can specify a report of up to 4 columns, each of which is Income and Expenses, Budget, or a Difference between two previous columns. Each column has its own date range, either specified explicitly by you, or with a named range like “Last Month”, “Year to Date” etc., that will be recalculated every time you use the report (if you Memorize it).

You also get to specify the heading for each column in the report, the report’s title, whether it is for all funds combined or split out by fund, and the level of accounts to include (top-level etc.).

You get the beta test (pre-test) version 1.42 Beta1, that includes Custom Reports (on the Reports menu of course) from www.software4nonprofits.com/accounts/pretest.htm.

Be sure to click the Help button on the new Custom Reports window to learn all about it – though if you want to try without that, to see how self-explanatory it seems, that would be fine too!

Please reply with any testing results either with a regular Comment on this blog, or by direct email. Thank you!

Fund Income Statements by Months/Quarters

Hello ACCOUNTS beta testers and advisors.

First, can I ask again for any feedback on my recent previous post, https://software4nonprofitsbooks.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/accounts-custom-reporting/, about the design of the new Custom Reporting feature for ACCOUNTS? We’d really like to be sure we’re on the right track, and haven’t missed anything crucial, before completing the first version of that feature.

This post though is about some new reports and features of existing reports, that you can try out in version 1.41 Beta1, available from the page www.software4nonprofits.com/accounts/pretest.htm.

The new reports are Reports ⇒ Fund ⇒ Income Statement by Months and Income Statement by Quarters, that are like the same-named Reports ⇒ Summary reports, except split out by fund, with a summary section showing the change in fund balances for the entire reporting period. This is something some users had been asking for.

The improvement is that Reports ⇒ Summary ⇒ Income Statement by Months and Income Statement by Quarters both now also prompt for an “Include” setting to determine the levels of accounts and sub-accounts to be included in the report, like many other reports do, but those ones didn’t.

If you could give that a try and let us know what you think, especially including any problems you observe with those reports, it would be much appreciated. As always, you can reply with a comment on the blog, or by replying directly by email.

ACCOUNTS Custom Reporting

While we aren’t anywhere near done, we are working towards a Custom Reports option for ACCOUNTS. A draft of the window for specifying them, with a sample filled-in, looks like:

As you can see, it can have from one to four columns of data in the report. Each report can be a Budget for a given date range, Income and Expenses for a given date range, or a Difference between the two previous columns. Differences must be between two Budget columns, two Income and Expenses columns, or one of each.

The report can be for all funds combined (like the existing reports under Reports -> Summary) or split out by fund (like the existing reports under Reports -> Fund).

As with many existing reports, you can set them to include All Levels of Account, Only Top-Level and Subaccounts, or Only Top-Level Accounts.

You also give it a Report Title.

The Date Ranges can be any of the following:

Last Month
Current Month to Date
Last Quarter
Current Quarter to Date
Year to Date
Year to Last Month End
Year to Last Quarter End
Last Year
Last Year to Date
Last Year to Last Month End
Last Year to Last Quarter End
Custom Date Range

The actual dates included in all of those are calculated for you, except for Custom Date Range, where you type in the dates.

If you Memorize and then replay such a report, the date ranges are re-calculated based on the current date, again except for Custom Date Range which uses the actual memorized dates. (There will be an option to redisplay the memorized Custom Report in the window above, so you can change such dates.)

There are going to be various rules about what ranges of dates are allowed for different columns, including:

• Budget columns must have their range of dates within one fiscal year.
• When you are showing a Difference between a Budget column and an Income and Expenses column, either the two columns must be for the exact same date range, or if the Income and Expenses is for less than a year, the Budget can be for the whole year.
• As in the current Budget reports, partial-year budgets are calculated as appropriate fractions of the entire year’s budget.

We would appreciate any thoughts and feedback you might have about this. Is there anything we have missed that your organization might realistically want, and that isn’t already in one of the built-in reports?

As always, you can reply directly by email, or by adding a Comment on this blog post. Thank you.

ACCOUNTS Recurring Transactions Testing

Hello ACCOUNTS beta testers. We have a significant new feature available in the beta test version at http://www.software4nonprofits.com/accounts/pretest.htm, and it would be great if you could test it!

The feature is recurring transactions, which some users have been asking for, for quite a while. As you will recall, we did a survey about it a while ago, and the results were that every option we asked about for how recurring transactions could be set up was needed by at least some users. As a result, there are a lot of options, and a lot of complexity to the programming to make them all work properly!

You can very safely test recurring transactions by memorizing some transactions (if you don’t already have them memorized), and making them recurring in the new Maintenance -> Recurring Transactions menu option’s window. If you set them up for immediate recurrence, when you exit ACCOUNTS and start it up again, any that are due to recur will be shown to you, and automatically inserted (or prompted for, if you chose that option). If you were doing that just for testing, just go into the register window for the account the transactions were inserted into, and delete them! And you can go back to the Recurring Transactions window to remove the recurrence if you set it up only for testing.

As always, we would greatly appreciate any feedback you have on the new features, including comments on the Help text associated with them. And as usual with significant new features, there will be a bonus of an extra 3 month’s support and upgrades renewal for the first user to find each real bug in our programming! (Of course, Kwame and I have tested things extensively, so we are hoping there are no remaining bugs!)

You can give feedback by commenting on this blog post, or just by emailing us directly. MANY THANKS!

New Software4Nonprofits Website

Hello ACCOUNTS beta testers and advisors. (If you also get the DONATION blog posts, please forgive this duplication!)

We have been working on updating our website to look good on any device, especially mobile devices like phones and tablets. It should have an appropriately adjusted display for those devices, so it’s not just squished pages as it is now. On your computer, it should look very much the same as before.

While we have been able to test the pages on a couple of different phones and tablets, obviously that testing is still limited. So we would like to invite you to please take a look at the draft version, which starts at www.software4nonprofits.com/NEW (the caps on “NEW” are required!) . If you can, look at it with both a regular web browser on your computer, and any devices you have. Please report any problems in the display and navigation of specific pages to us, so that we can fix them.

When reporting display and navigation problems, please include:

• the device and the screen size (if known),
• the problem web page,
• and the description of the problem.

If you see any typos or anything that appears to be bad writing or factual errors, we’d also love to hear about that! (Those things probably haven’t changed from the current live website.)

Please enjoy the new experience of our website on your mobile devices. As soon as we have a reasonable number of replies, we will upload this draft to be the new official site for DONATION and ACCOUNTS at the main web address.

Thank you.

Payroll Samples for the U.S.A.

Hello ACCOUNTS advisors. This is specifically for any of you in the U.S.A. who have payrolls.

If you look in the Index of the program’s Help, there is a page “Payroll Samples”, with screen shots of Write Cheques (Write Checks for you Americans!) windows for Canada. That includes both a transaction for paying payroll cheques with appropriate deductions, and the monthly submission to the Canada Revenue Agency (equivalent to the IRS) to submit those deducted payroll taxes to them.

Could any of you please send us either screen shots or just written out samples of similar transactions for the U.S.A., so I can add them to that page? I just don’t know what exactly the right accounts would be named for your country, so I need a bit of help to get the details right.

Probably email would be best for replies about this – info@software4nonprofits.com as always.

Thank you.

ACCOUNTS New Version Testing

Hello again ACCOUNTS beta testers. I have uploaded a new beta test version, 1.36 Beta2. We would greatly appreciate it if as many of you as possible could test it out. As usual, you get it from:

http://www.software4nonprofits.com/accounts/pretest.htm

There are a lot of small improvements in it, including:

• Major speedup in loading Register windows with lots of transactions in them
• Email Sending Configuration working better with Gmail addresses
• several other small feature improvements and bug fixes, all of which are listed on that pretest.htm page, and the Revision History in the program’s Help.

However, the biggest change from our perspective (which you should really not see at all) is a significant re-organization of the program’s code so that a lot of pieces of it can be shared with our DONATION program (used for tracking donors and donations and issuing charitable receipts). If we have done this correctly, you won’t see a single difference from it, but if we missed something, some features could fail to work.

Of course, both Kwame and I have carefully tested pretty much every feature in the program, but we know from experience that the more different people test things, the more likely problems are to be caught, because someone else will just try something in a slightly different way than we thought of trying it.

As always, if you encounter any problems report them to us ASAP and we will fix them and get a fix back to you ASAP as well.

Thank you very much in advance.

New Video on Bank Deposits

Hello again ACCOUNTS advisors. I wanted to let you know that over the last couple of weeks, we have updated and re-recorded all of the introductory and training videos for our DONATION program on the Demos and Samples page on its website, at www.software4nonprofits.com/demos.htm. We haven’t yet done that for the ACCOUNTS videos, because they are less out of date than the DONATION ones were.

The videos for both programs are also now hosted on YouTube, and can be found there by searching. One great side effect of that is that previously, the videos didn’t work on most phones or tablets – now they do. The ACCOUNTS videos are on its Demos and Samples page, at www.software4nonprofits.com/accounts/demos.htm.

There’s also a new video posted on both the DONATION and ACCOUNTS Demos and Samples pages, on configuring and creating bank deposits in DONATION, and exporting them to ACCOUNTS or Intuit QuickBooks.

We’d be most interested in hearing what you think of the new and revised videos.

Thank you.

One Account Details with Balances Reports

Hello ACCOUNTS advisors. A user is questioning the presence of the Starting Balance and Ending Balance figures included in Reports -> Details -> One Account Details and Balances and One Account Details and Running Balances, when you run them for income and expense accounts.

The problem is that those balances are the totals of all transactions over all years that you have been using the program, which makes a lot of sense (as being the current “balance”) for balance sheet accounts (assets, liabilities, and funds) but makes very little sense for income statement accounts (income and expenses).

The question is what exactly is the right fix, when running those reports for income statement accounts. (There will be no change for balance sheet accounts!)

One option (“Option 1”) is to just eliminate those lines for the balances entirely, when running for income statement accounts. For the Running Balances report, it would just start at $0. For the regular Balances report, it would just give a total for the selected time period at the bottom, instead of an ending balance.

Another option I considered (“Option 2”) is to have the opening balance be included, but it would just be the total in that account since the beginning of your fiscal year that includes the starting date for the report. (So if the start date was the start of a fiscal year, it would always be $0.) And the ending balance would be that starting balance plus the sum of all transactions for the dates included in the report. That makes some sense, but starts to make less sense if you run that report over a time period that includes parts of 2 or more fiscal years.

Which of these two options do you prefer?

The other problem of removing balances from these reports is that the reports’ names are then somewhat inaccurate, when run for income statement accounts, since the names say “with Balances” but we may have removed those balances! Any thoughts? Of course the report description in the Help, and in the Report Browser, could explain those differences.

Thank you in advance for your feedback.

ACCOUNTS non-numeric reference #s

Hello again ACCOUNTS advisors. I’m finally addressing an issue that someone brought up some months back, which is about entering reference numbers (also known as transaction numbers) for transactions that aren’t composed solely of digits, for instance “A1234”, for non-cheque transactions.

Currently the Register window allows such reference/transaction numbers, but warns you that if the transaction is a cheque, this will be a problem. (That message also states “you seem to be entering a cheque” regardless of what transaction type you entered, which seems clearly incorrect.)

In the Write Cheques window, however, although you can change the transaction type, only numeric reference/transaction numbers are allowed to be entered and saved. That needs to be fixed, so that other types of transactions that have non-numeric reference numbers can also be entered on that window.

So far so good. The problem comes in what do about the warning messages. I think it’s clear that if the entered transaction type is definitely for a cheque, and the transaction number is non-numeric, there should be a warning and confirmation question as there is now on the Register window. The transaction types that I’m clear indicate it’s a cheque are CHECK, CHEQUE, CHK, and CHQ. Any others? (I’m wondering about French and Spanish versions. Google Translate says the French is chèque and Spanish is cheque, so that’s pretty simple!)

Perhaps if the transaction type includes “CH” anywhere, or is empty, the warning should say something like “It appears that this might be a cheque …”.

And if the transaction type is anything else that doesn’t include “CH”, there would never be a warning about non-numeric reference/transaction numbers.

Make sense? Any other thoughts? Thanks.