Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: finance committees

[R Philip Dowds (rpdowds]

I agree with the Meadow Wood view.  I don’t know how it is for dentists, but I 
know how it is for architects:  There are quite a few time- and cost-tracking / 
billing / accounting programs custom-tailored to serve the architecture and 
engineering professions, and in my opinion none of them work.  What I ended up 
doing was “keeping book” in a cheap generic program (in my case, MYOB / 
AccountEdge, not QuickBooks), and running the business via an manually linked 
relational database I customized in FileMaker.  MYOB better conforms to GAAP 
(Generally Accepted Accounting Practices), but QB is easier for civilians to 
use.  Maybe there are some HOA-dedicated, property management programs out 
there that works fine, but my experience with all these proprietary programs is 
that they never quite match what I want to do, really, and they are impossible 
to modify.

Philip Dowds
Cornerstone Cohousing
Cambridge, MA

mobile: 617.460.4549
email:   rpdowds [at] comcast.net <mailto:rpdowds [at] comcast.net>

> On Aug 1, 2015, at 1:48 AM, Kay Wilson <kwilsonfisk [at] comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> For another view - I sent this out to our finance people, and this is the 
> response I received:
> 
>       "QuickBooks is industry standard, user friendly and interfaces with 
> virtually everyone.  It is inexpensive to own and to run.  I personally 
> wonder about any accountant who is not happy to use it.  With a basic 
> accounting knowledge it is quite easy to understand and use (although I 
> realize MANY who use it do not fully understand how it works).  Our 
> accountant is an expert at it, so much so that he has an assistant who 
> "modems in" to the businesses they service monthly to quickly and efficiently 
> see that everything is in order and no one is screwing things up.
> 
>       "We have reviewed countless other systems and worked with over a dozen 
> industry specific accounting programs (dentistry, sheet metal, car audio, and 
> medical to name a few), that DO NOT follow standard accounting formats and 
> truly are mysterious in their formatting (along with complicated and 
> expensive).  There is nothing any system I have seen does that QuickBooks 
> does not have the ability to do, and there is plenty QuickBooks can do that 
> the others are not set for.
> 
>       "I suggest staying with QuickBooks OR going to a manual set of books as 
> our accounting picture is just not that complicated at Meadow Wood."
> 
> Kay Wilson
> Meadow Wood Cohousing
> mwcondo [at] google.com <mailto:mwcondo [at] google.com>