Opinions on New Software4Nonprofits Home Page

First of all, my apologies to any of you who get both of our blogs (for DONATION and ACCOUNTS) – you will be getting this post a 2nd time.

We have updated the home page www.software4nonprofits.com to include new sections with an overview of the pricing for each version for each of our two programs, and an overview of the differences between each version.

We’re interested in your thoughts on the changes, and our specific wording.

It was tricky to do this, because we don’t want to say too much (people won’t read it) but also don’t want to say too little so that it will be misleading. Each new section has links at the bottom for further details.

Thank you in advance for any reactions, which you can send as comments to the blog, or just by direct email replies.

Bug in Hidden Accounts appearing in Drop-Down Lists

Hello ACCOUNTS blog readers.

I think I have discovered a bug, but I want to run it by you all before I change it. It has to do with the fact that it appears that hidden accounts are appearing on drop-down lists of accounts you can use in transactions, when they shouldn’t.

The one time that I believe hidden accounts should appear in drop-downs, is if you are editing an existing transaction, that already used that hidden account. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see that already-used account.

The time that it seems the program is displaying them anyways, when it shouldn’t, is when it’s a new transaction being edited (one you haven’t saved yet), but the main account you are working on (say, a bank account you are in the register window for) has ever in the past had some transaction that included that hidden account.

I can’t really see why I originally decided to program it that way, and now it appears to me that it is just annoying – you will always see hidden accounts in the drop-down account lists of a register window that ever had a transaction using that account.

The whole point, in my mind, of hidden accounts, is “this is an account I used to use, but don’t any more”. So I don’t want to see it, merely because I used it in the past in this same register!

The same probably applies to entering transactions in other windows like Write Cheques etc. – the wrong behaviour would apply if any past transaction on the bank account you were writing cheques for ever used that hidden account.

Does this make sense to you, that I should remove that behaviour, so the only time a hidden account is shown is when you are editing an existing transaction that already used it? Of course, if you need to use it again in a new transaction, for some reason, you can always go to the Chart of Accounts window, edit the account, and un-hide it.

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

By the way, out of interest, the way I ran into this bug was that I was doing what programmers call “eating your own dog food”, namely actually using the program in production for a real organization (a non-profit I’m involved with as Treasurer). I had some accounts that were used early last year, but that we stopped using, but they kept coming up when entering new transactions and it was annoying!

Important ACCOUNTS Testing Needed

Hello ACCOUNTS beta testers.

The program that we create ACCOUNTS with, PowerBuilder, has a significant new release, and we have created a new version of ACCOUNTS with it. Although you should see almost no changes in ACCOUNTS due to this, for us it’s a big deal, and as such, we have jumped the version number of ACCOUNTS up to 2.00.

Although we have done significant testing ourselves on this new version, the only way to be sure it will work well for everyone is to have many users test it. So PLEASE if at all possible, try it out, by downloading and installing it from the page:

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

Unlike most beta test updates that we put on this page, this one needs to be done with a full installation program, which means you need to know whether you are running the Standalone, Network Server or Network Client version, and download and install that version from this page. If you aren’t sure which version you are running on this computer, use the Help -> About ACCOUNTS menu option in your current installation of ACCOUNTS to find out.

If you encounter any issues that you think may be new problems, please inform us of them as soon as possible, and we will fix them as quickly as possible. If something is a real problem for you and we do not think we will be able to fix it quickly, you can always revert to the existing version 1.42, built with the older version of PowerBuilder, by downloading and installing from the normal DOWNLOAD page:

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

As always, you can send us your experiences by replying to this blog post online, or by directly emailing us. In this unusual case, it would be good to hear from you even if you try this and don’t observe any problems, just so we can have some notion of how many of you have tried it.

If you are also using our DONATION program for tracking donors and donations and issuing charitable receipts, there was already a similar beta test release of the new version of it a few days ago. Only one tiny bug was found so far, which has been fixed.

Many thanks.

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.