Discover the Best Printing Bill Format for NPOs

Printing bill format for NPOs

the broadcast is now starting all attendees are in listen-only mode hi everyone my name is Ben Lossman and I'm Communications Coordinator at TechSoup Canada I'd like to welcome and thank you all for joining us for today's webinar using QuickBooks to audit proof your organization before we get started I'd like to quickly introduce you to TechSoup Canada our mission is to help nonprofits use technology effectively and we accomplish this in two ways the first is to make technology products more affordable through our technology donations program we partner with tech companies such as Microsoft Adobe and Symantec and offer their products as either an outright donation or at a significant discount for charities nonprofits and libraries across Canada membership is free and it gets you access to donated and discounted software for more than 30 tech companies through this program we've helped over 30 1,400 nonprofits save more than three hundred and sixty two million dollars in tech investments the second way we try to help nonprofits use technology effectively is by creating and curating nonprofit tech resources we write blogs curate content on social media and host events and webinars like this one to help nonprofits learn more about the technologies that can help them in their day to day work so if there's ever a topic you'd like to learn more about please let us know we are always eager to get feedback from our members for today's webinar you can use the GoToWebinar panel on the right hand side of your screen to change your audio settings enter your questions or chat with us at the end of the webinar presentation we will have a formal Q&A session where I'll ask questions to the speaker on your behalf just a reminder you are on mute so if you have any questions or concern feel free to chat to us in the question box also note that this webinar is being recorded and we will upload the video on our website shortly now it's my pleasure to introduce our speakers for today Bob Lang and Jean Elwell Bob Lang is the president at legacy advantage prior to legacy he worked at KPMG doing nonprofit audits and reviews currently he's the treasurer at the Vancouver Fringe Festival Bob is passionate about helping nonprofits achieve success he believes when compliance is a non-issue nonprofits will have more time and energy to focus on fulfilling their destinies and Jean recently joined legacy advantage as manager of the vancouver office where she oversees and coaches employees to provide more valuable information and advice to clients prior to her current position Jean had a successful CPA practice specializing in nonprofit entity and charity review engagements and audits Jean has been involved in many nonprofit boards of governance over her career most often as a treasurer and believes that the key to success for charity isn't enough and nonprofits is through education so now we will pass it over to you Bob and you can take it from there hello everyone Oh Ben can you see my screen here yes yes we can okay great so I have Jean here with me first of all I want to say great job to TechSoup a lot of our clients use TechSoup to get discounted software so I great shout out to you guys and you know I keep doing what you're doing so today we are going to talk about how to use QuickBooks to ensure your nonprofit is audit proof preparing for your end is very important as we're approaching that season and many of you are gonna have either CRA audits or financial statement audits so this one is addressing more of the latter so my name is Bob Wayne this is Jean oh well hi and we love charities okay so as Bob mentioned there's probably two types of audit that you're gonna come across you are probably all familiar with a year-end audit that comes every year and the other thing you might come across is the CRA audits where they want to make sure that you qualify for the charitable status okay so the agenda for today we're gonna we're gonna talk about a few things here we're gonna discuss adequate controls around cash management we're gonna talk about having a knowledgeable board have a manageable and understandable chart of accounts proper internal controls over expenses good documentation and compliance of grants that you might receive and do not co-mingle externally restrictive funds how to actually keep the records and there's some common errors so you know we we feel like if you follow all these instructions and have proper controls in place you will have a very very smooth financial statement on it at your end the first one is about having adequate controls around cash management basically use less cash so yeah you want to limit as much as you can the use of cash and one of the first and most obvious thing and charities always here is segregation of duty so this is really important because often in charities you will have a limited number of volunteers and I was telling Bob about a review I did last year where they had a charity and they did a fundraising event and they had the bookkeeper collect the cash at the event and then the bookkeeper counted the cash by herself and then prepared the cash deposit and also reconciled the bank so when I was doing the review I noted that this cash did not get deposited to the bank for four months and when it did get deposited weren't sure that the amount that was counted was the amount that got deposited so in this case we had a bookkeeper who and and this happens all the time in charitable organizations as people are around cash and because they're around cash they we always assume that they are good people but they get they think okay I'll just borrow this money and I'll pay it back next Tuesday and their morals tend to get a bit blurred and they become tempted so the big key is avoid having them with cash and of course if you do have someone counting cash always make sure there's two people counting cash together and that you separate who counts the cash and who makes the bank deposit and reconciles the bank so Jeanne just a quick question here how many people in the entire process that process should be involved in this cash collection so you have a fundraiser event you know there should be a cash counter yeah there's two cash counters does the depositor can that be a cash counter as well or a separate person okay well and and and here's what you have to there's no firm rules because if you've got a really small charity and you've only got a couple of volunteers you have to do the best you can so the important thing is to have whoever's counting the cash watched by someone else and signing it off so that you've got some little signed form that says this is how much cash we collected so that someone in the future ideally a third person or at least different from the person depositing the cash would say yes this amounts - made it to the bank and then the person that records the cash into the county system is that going to be a different person or can that be a counterfeit cash hunter as well well that should be a different person but again if you have a tiny little because they should I guess yeah resources are definitely straight you have to do the best you can so generally speaking you know take cash sorry take checks as much as possible use credit cards increase online donations now I know you might be thinking you're there there's fees involved but you know yeah there is but then you you sleep better at night and you reduce the temptation from from your volunteers so just so you guys know PayPal actually has a non profit rate so if you call them and say we want to take donations through PayPal and you provide evidence that you are a non-profit they can get actually give you a heavily discounted rate that could be a solution as well for our clients we use we're Tessa and Pluto they're great for recurring donors and we basically set our clients up as pre-authorized donors so that you know the donors would basically sign a Priora agreement and then every month the same amount comes up and these are relatively low fee as compared to PayPal because you only pay a dollar transaction as opposed to a percentage of revenues so here are the links if you are interested Pluto you can go to Pluto comm Rochester you go and go hsn.comm basically the donors will sign a pre authorizations which gives you and then give you a void check and then you can automate these donations and the best of all is they can all synchronize it with QuickBooks Online which makes a reconciliation a lot easier so here's a quick example that one of our clients had implemented so they are a non-profit child care Society the problem is they always have post-dated chats but sometimes the dollar written on the post-dated cheque isn't always the same as the fees for the month because there might be a Prodi date in my house the kids might miss a day or you know all these extra things come up and so the executive director ends up spending a lot of time a lot of her time chasing for these small doll so what ended up happening is we implemented wrote essa and all the parents signed their pre-authorized evan agreements and basically whenever there's a small charge the amount just basically gets pulled through their accounts and everybody's happy less paperwork and all that gets processed through QuickBooks okay so the second point we wanted to touch on is and this is really important is make sure your board is knowledgeable because the Prophet proper governance is the foundation to staying audit group and for those of you that don't know the CRA has a fabulous section for charities and I've included the link here and this just goes to the main charities page but on this page you'll find all sorts of things you'll find tools for directors you'll find everything that you need to have on the charitable receipts you will find setting up a charity it's just a really good section here now I found in my practice that most of the charities that I audited or did reviews for were governed by a group of people who were very attached to the cause of the charity and very passionate about the cause of the charity and not necessarily a lot of financial background so this happened a lot and I used to find them you know whenever I ran into people at these events and they'd say are you a CPA can you be our treasurer so you want to find a treasurer who can lead and make sense of the financial statements to the board so that the board can make appropriate financial decisions and stay on track so yeah as I said most people are on boards not because they are because they buy into the mission not because the business people the other thing is that charities are different from from profit organizations their aim is to do good as opposed to make a profit in fact profit motivation is discouraged by the donors so if I'm a donor to a charity I want to give you $10,000 but I want to make sure that you spend the money on what I want you to I don't want you to keep the money or keep anything back I want it all to be gone and likewise you'll often find that government grants will not give you money if you have funds left in your operating surplus so the other thing that you want your board to do is to set a budget so you can set a budget at the based on the prior three years and do that on a projected way knowing what you know for the years to come and you can use QBO to keep you on track here now here's another little orphan point at the bottom remember that when you're using your minutes you make sure that they are signed minutes Board minutes need to be signed so if you're gonna be and here's just a little screenshot from QuickBooks and this shows you how to set your budget so you just want to go to reports no no wait no this is not setting the budget this is how to print your budget so you're gonna go to reports and you're gonna go to budgeting and then you're gonna compare budget versus actuals and this will give you a report that you compare monthly at the board meeting and let you know how close you are to meeting your targets we're just going to add a point here as sometimes the budgets are tracked outside of QuickBooks or in an Excel spreadsheet again that's fine if it works for you but if you wanted to automate that process a bit and I guess digitize it you can actually add the budget directly into QuickBooks by going to the gear box here and then click on budgeting and this is where you actually enter the month month budget and then as Jean said if you wanted to see the budget versus actual reports you would go to reports and then budget versus actual thanks Bob okay here's another one I see this so this is you want to make sure that you have a manageable chart of accounts and a lot of the charities we've looked at it seems to the history seems to have been that every time on the board wants to look at say how many things have we purchased from this supplier instead of doing a report that seeks for searches for that amount they create a separate chart of accounts for that they're a separate account for that supplier same with classes we have one organization that has classes they also have a separate account for each class so they end up having this huge four dimensional spread page so the important thing with your chart of accounts is you want to keep it simple and this is how you want to do it so in order to keep it unreal wieldy you are going to start with the end product so what is the information that you want and the first thing you want to do is figure out who your users are so one of your users is going to be the CRA so you obviously want to make sure your reports give you that information but the more important one for you is the board what does the board want so it's sometimes a useful place to start to take the year and financial statements and see this is at least what we're required to report and then tweak it a bit to figure out what the board wants and then go backwards and try to limit the chart of accounts so that they they compress to give you that information more detail doesn't necessarily mean more accuracy so one of the things we've done with several of our clients is we've taken an unwieldy chart of accounts and we've made subheadings so we'll take a chunk of 25 accounts and put it in something that appears on the financial statements like administration or something like that so that will just take a whole bunch of information and put it at a level that board members want to see and often you will have will will often have two different types of reports we'll have a summarized report that will go to the board of directors and we'll have a more detailed report that will go to the executive director and then I mentioned this earlier if users do want more information how much have we bought from Polaris plumbing or repairs and maintenance in the first six months you can just tweak QuickBooks to to find that and do a simplified report for you okay so this is just a screenshot of the chart of accounts area so you can find that by going to accounting and then your chart of accounts and you can this is this will give me the list and then if you want to create a sub a new account to give you a subheading you'll just tweak up there and you can see in this case it's creating a sub-account of insurance but you can create a header account here and then put all the sub accounts underneath it exactly as you might see on the left hand side in the background here there's five insurance accounts and you know what's it hidden behind there is you know you have the main insurance account but then you have insurance car insurance general insurance swimming or whatever and really you know they don't need to be their own headings instead if you create a subheading you can just summarize all that under insurance and then when you create a collapsed report all these insurance accounts get summarized into one yeah and and also you know to tie back to our source tie back to our title presentation how to make your finished image Auto proof the board is there to help you review your books and the Edie is there to make sure there's accuracy so if your chart of accounts is too complicated it makes it really hard for the board to actually help you by reviewing the financials so if you give them up and understand about financial statement they can actually understand what's going on and if you have questions they can always ask later and so in that way you're giving yourself a better chance to catch mistakes before it goes through an audit and I might just add to that bob is one of the things that you can do at your board to make sure that you have a clean audit is ask questions when when the treasurer is giving the report if something looks weird just ask the question because it could be something that you know they've missed her if it doesn't make sense to use making sense to someone else - yeah okay so internal controls over expenses okay is this me okay so this is okay so you want to make sure that you have complete documentation the audit if you're having an audit the auditors are going to make a selection and they're going to ask the documentation so you don't know what they're gonna ask for that you have to keep support for everything and one of the things that QuickBooks is really good at is it allows you to attach the receipts and Bill's right on to the transaction and I love this feature so that means you don't have to scan and upload things and put them into directories you can just scan it once and it's there and you can find it whenever you want the other thing that is we find useful are two apps receipt bank and Expensify Bob do you want to tell us about these yeah so receipt bank and Expensify are both receipts management tools so to speak you can google them and find find them you see bank receipt bank is really good for when you're spending let's say you have a charity credit card and your executive director is on the road they're spending money on the charity credit card and they would take photos of the receipts that they incur and all of that gets pushed to receipt bank where you can categorize and then publish to quickbooks online in that process the actual receipt the image of the receipts get attached to quickbooks online so it's a very good documentation tool Expensify we found it's incredible and managing employee expense reports so if you have an executive director using their own credit card or you know admin they use you know his own credit card then they kept submit their own expenses through it specified and again attach the after receipts and when you published it qbo coo coo quickbooks online all the receipts get attached so another comment with internal controls is using something like Pluto or way pay in this case to add multiple layers of authorization so a typical way of getting checks signed is you printing off the bill printing off the cheque stapling and getting two more members to come on site to actually sign checks and it's a very frustrating process and it's very paper-based as well so what would weigh pay what you can do is actually create those expenses in QuickBooks those get synchronized two-way pay and then the bookkeeper or that or the accountant or the admin and actually initiate payment and then the board members can actually approve those payments anywhere in the world and money just goes out again this is a multiple layer authorization process that can be used for board members that are not often not always in town this is especially important let's say in the summer time where all the board members go go away and you don't have enough signers to actually get checks out so the payroll audit process is you can also use QuickBooks to manage that so in the process make sure you have proper employee contracts and if there are contractors sure you have those contracts as well so at this moment you know just make sure you actually go through the exercise to ensure if they are actually contractors or if they're actually employees because if they're employees and you're paying them like contractors you can really be penalized heavily sometimes you have departments so if your payroll is broken onto departments each other you have backups on how you calculate it does so for example an executive director she spends half her time in department a half to overtime in Department B and that payroll cost is separated half and half just make sure you have an accelerator that backs up that calculation because as the auditor goes through your payroll line they'll they will need to they will do want to ask for that yeah if I can just add to that Bob on that employee versus contractor issue yeah a lot of a lot of people ask the question what is the penalty if I pay them like the contractor or the employee so the risk associated with classifying them correctly resides with the payor so there's no risk taken by the contractor or employee those to their best interest to do what suits them but the penalty is if you pay them as a contract if you pay them as a contractor and CRA deems them to be an employee which means you said all their or you have control over them if CRA deems them to be your employee then you are responsible for all their payroll deductions including their portion of it so that's the penalty plus interest yes and here's an example here's an example of where you can attach it so let's say we're creating a check this is a screen for for quickbooks online and where you actually quit check and you see the bottom here there's a there's an attachment section so what you can do is actually you know house in the process of creating this check you can actually upload or drive and drop the associated bill okay so that's how you create keep great records sometimes you want to have a special journal entry so let's say you want to make a year an adjustment or or like I said the payroll adjustment the adjustments are usually done for journal entry so in this case you can actually upload the excel file to this journal entry so that when the auditor has a question about this journal entry you're not digging around to find that excel document it's it's already here attached document 8 ok and yeah this I think I alluded to this a bit earlier so this is an issue a documentation and compliance of grant requirements so the big issue with charities and this is what the CRA wants when they audit you and they want to make sure and also the external auditors they want to make sure that you are doing what your granters donors contributors want you to so that's that's the issue so oops in order to facilitate this process step 1 keep all keep all your grant compliance agreements and know where to find them second read them I'm sure you understand what you're supposed to do in order to get this money and what the money is allowed to be spent on don't get double funding for the same program okay so I was telling Bob about a case last a couple years ago I had a client who was um they were raising money for an emergency vehicle and so they went to all around the community and got lots of funding they ended up getting 120 percent of the vehicle funded and so they were super happy that they had more money than the vehicle cost but we're not so happy when they found out that they had to give it back because the money had to be used for only for the emergency vehicle so and then in order to keep your records a good idea is like Bob just showed us attaching the grant grant document in quickbooks online where you see the deposit funds coming in gene if you get and just quickly clarify I think I think I had a hang-up on returning funds back to the donors yeah in this case you're not talking about restricted donations we're talking about government grants or corporate grants to a specific program rights can be restricted donations as well so this is a cursory yes you can okay okay yeah so this is a sponsor and they say here's 5,000 it's to be used for the emergency vehicle but they've already raised all the money so guess what that's the only thing it can be used for it's externally restricted okay so and yes oh so this also as part of that do not co-mingle your externally restricted funds so if money's coming in you want to make sure that you know how much has come from this community organization how much has come from that and especially if you've got different programs you want to make sure that you're not commingling one program to another this creates a bookkeepers hornet's nest so you can avoid that by setting up different classes within QuickBooks for different projects so you've got your emergency vehicle you've got your whatever I'll stay there other equipment there's ropes and rescue equipment in this case then you don't want to transfer funds from one account to another without documentation of the appropriate approval so the approvals if it's externally restricted comes from the donor if it's internally restricted it comes from the Gord it's not necessary to open a separate bank account for each fund but you need to keep separate appropriate records and you can use classes and some some branches do require you to keep a separate bank account like the BC gaming society so the keeping of the records generally speaking it's best to keep them for at least seven years I think the rule is a six year after the last calendar year or whatever but basically what that means is yeah seven years so keep records of proper property planned equipment purchases so they just means anything capital that you capitalize in your in your charity attached to the transaction itself so previously we saw examples of attaching the bills to the actual sorry attaching the expenses to the actual bills like in this case use that feature to do that keep records of insurance and thank you for seven years separate folders for each grant okay insured donation receipts are complying with the CRA requirement so we're gonna show that in a bit but if you just google CRA donation receipts you'll get a whole list of all the little things that you need to include in the charity receipt for it to be legal for your donors to claim them to see here are some tools to keep your records again receipt bank and Expensify are great not only do they push store transactions into QuickBooks they actually keep that data for seven years on their servers as well so if you ever need to go back it's gonna be there a question that I get often is does CRN accept digital records now this is still up for debate but for a from a lot of other bookkeepers that I've seen the the CRA is okay with photos of receipts so they don't want you to you know digitally generator is see but since they're not actually recreating the receipt let's say you go to a Starbucks and you know purchase Missy if you take a photo of that it's the digital copy of an actual receipt so they're they're okay with that but again it to be safe you might as well just file it for for seven years this actual paper form if you're using a donor management system such as you know kindly you know don't eros or whatever and you're keeping the donation tracking separate from your accounting system make sure to reconcile it monthly what that means is you print off all the donations you generate in the accounting software and all the donations received in the don't imagine software make sure those two numbers are exactly the same that's what the auditors are gonna look for and here's some common errors so one of the IRAs of what we've seen is don't net revenues against expenses so for example your honor you run a program let's say trip to India and you raise money for that trip and you spend money in that trip and then the revenues and expenses are actually tracked in one chart of accounts called trip to India so you're essentially recording them as net so you know it may be okay for internal purposes but front of for financial statement purposes they need to be separated and so I you know traffic separately I see this often Bob and when people get the funding from for students the government students often gets netted against payroll and it can't it needs to be disclosed as a revenue item right don't record pledges as revenues until received this is different than grants grants are legal documents but this means is just you know what what's the percentage likelihood that the pledges actually come in so when people make a pledge it's a promise right and from individuals it's hard to chase down and they might renege on that promise but a grant is a legal document so the government signs grant is that a contract with you to deliver funds for you to deliver service so if you have pledges you you don't record them as revenues but you if you receive a grant you would gifts in kind or $1000 must be appraised Jean how would you get something like that appraised you'd have to phone and qualified appraiser would probably charge you but yeah it has to be a specific so sometimes there might be you know easier if someone just sells the item there just gives you cash that is he and his cleaner and then donation for service is not allowed so the chair the CRA recommends performing a check has changed where the let's say the auditor wants to donate their services which may or may not ever happen they would perform the service and they would bill you and you pay for it and that same dollar the same same dollar amount gets donated to the charity as a check that's an actual exchange of cash right so that's that's what's recommended because then you have a paper trail and it's basically do you have any and so here is a list of all the receipts that sorry items you need to have on the charity receipts again you can just google this but basically you'd have a serial number registration number with CRA that's her charity number location date year date through their seat full name including middle middle initials a lot of people still miss this address all the donors amount of the gift amount of description of any advantages received by the donor you did you want explain what advantages [Laughter] no advantageous means do they get any benefit from this transaction right so so let's say for example they go to a gala and the ticket costs $100 but like the meal itself cost 30 dollars so you know you would issue a receipt for $100 with $30 as an advantage so basically what saying is that we're telling the CRA that this donor can only receive $70 worth of charitable donation credits okay and the name of upside of charity OCR so this is actually a very important you need to have the charity website on the donation receipts or else it's actually not you know claimable be alright so that was us talking for 30 minutes I know right love to welcome any questions at this point you can also find us on Facebook and legacy Advantage or email us so thank you so much Bob and Jean for your very informative and also very casual and and I really loved your back and forth there it was really conversational and nice so everyone we now have some time to take questions from the audience so if you haven't entered your questions yet please do so now by using the questions chat box in your GoToWebinar panel we've had some questions coming in throughout the presentation so we'll start with those but you can feel free to continue populating our question box so Bob and Jean we are going to start with a question from Andrew early on in your presentation you talked about collecting signed papers for cash collections what should nonprofits do with those signed papers once they've collected them so you mean okay so I guess what Andrews talking about is we've got someone collecting cash and we've got someone counting it with them and they initial it so you want to file those within your cash collection section of your deposits so that when you get audited at the end of the year a person can say okay this is what two people said was counted and that agrees to the amount that got deposited into the bank does that make sense well I guess Andrew canty yeah and and I would say if you wanted to file that digitally you can always scan and attach it to the QuickBooks transaction because you know when you're recording to deposit into your QuickBooks you gotta create a transaction right and every transaction has the ability for you to attach something and so this is something you can attach as well and that's actually a very good question a very good segue to a question that we had come in from Ramon who asks can we maintain scan copies of expenditure back up such as receipts vouchers tabs etc instead of using paper copies yeah and so I think I addressed this at the very end so it basically can see our accept digital copies from from my experience and from actually a lot of my colleague you could experience the CRA is ok with accepting scanned copies of physical receipts or even photos of physical receipts so I would say you know I don't think the CRA came out and directly said that but just from all the documents is the requested they've been ok with having a USB stick with all the documents in there so again I would say keep it digital but just in case followed away in a simple filing system sometimes I recommend my clients say look half have 12 folders one for each month and just put everything in there and then digitize digitize at the same time so if in the event that they don't accept the actual digital receipts you can actually go back to the month and find the actual item just that's that's a good compromise between you know vendor based system where it's super complicated and not having yeah and I can just add to that I have never found it unless that's changed since I I never found anything printed that said they would accept digital but by the same I've never in all my years of having CRA audits with my clients I've never seen them reject digital copies so that's a relief so going back to the first part of the presentation when we were talking about cash margaret Ramos asks should volunteers that are handling cash go through a police clearance I don't know that the police clearance actually gives any comfort on cash it's more about kids and as far as I know so I think I think the the different answer is no because I mean at the end of the day you wouldn't put someone that you don't trust in that position anyway and I think the our point is that you want to remove temptation as much as possible you know you may someone may go through a check for these check and they may have no criminal but doesn't mean they won't commit their first one right so you just want to limit as much opportunity for temptation as possible mm-hmm that makes sense so this question comes from Wahid Wahid says nonprofit organizations do not recover 100% of HST paid in our case we recover 50 percent of federal HST and 82 percent of provincial HST as far as I know QuickBooks is not able to do this type of calculation automatically and set up a chest irrecoverable at the time of entering invoice and QuickBooks do you know of any solution yeah it's good question so thankfully aware and BC and we only we deal with GST PST portion which means the PSD is totally not refundable but only 50% is recoverable for GST HST environment yeah I would say just you know I would say even record it I had the full amount at then at the end of every year manually just the full amount into the recoverable and non recoverable portion Jean would you have any portion that it works out to when you do that yeah so in QuickBooks you can actually trade what they call it internally sorry inclusive rate so for example you know if we want to claim back 50% of GST we would create a tax code account that has two point four three nine percent as recoverable GST what that means is let's say you have a full amount of one hundred and five dollars if you if we multiply that by two point four three nine we get the actual exact amounts how do we backed all the 5% and taken up so back to other five dollars it taking fifty percent of that so you can actually work backwards and create a create a formula that maybe creates one inclusive rate and that you can use we used to have HST here in BC that was before your time so we have a series of technical questions from a bunch of different people around the differences between QuickBooks desktop and QuickBooks Online I'm not sure if you you two are able to speak to the differences between the two but a lot of people are asking can you use QuickBooks desktop to attach image files and digital copies of receipts and stuff like that and is there a big functional difference if you're using the desktop version versus using the online file online platform yeah I mean they are question if they are different and they are the same like the the basic features the same you can create a bill you can create an expense you can create invoices that kind of stuff but with a user interface and how you work in and all the buttons there are a cotton ball in different places so you take does take time to get used to in terms of functionality I would say they're about 80 percent the same QuickBooks Online is still pretty young product and it does tell have quite some bugs but you know the the team is working on it and we've been able to find workarounds and and and basically patches to resolve these issues in terms of attaching documents in QuickBooks desktop you can but it's actually not great if you go to the actual expense and the top bar there's actually a place where you can attach it but the problem is every time you attach an image file you're actually making the QuickBooks desktop bigger and so over the course of 1 2 3 4 years your QuickBooks desktop file becomes like 224 gigabytes and it just becomes really really heavy and it's not it's not ideal with the quickbooks online you have basically unlimited storage and you can attach as much as you want and it doesn't slow down the file because it's cloud-based right all that all that data is on a cloud server somewhere so that's that's kind of the main difference in terms of attaching files and so for for our listeners who are using QuickBooks desktop what kind of workarounds do you suggest for dealing with file attachments and everything as you know to make sure that the the footprint of the actual product doesn't get too large to manage well yeah I use desktop for years and a lot of charity clients and and we never did attach because the charities files tend to get quite big anyway so all we did is we created subfolders for the different types of them basically matched the financial statements and the records just went into the subfolders so you have one folder called cash and you'll put all the deposits there you went all the called grants you put all the grants there put all the bills so yeah trial yeah can you travel if you have a travel expense you put all the travel receipts there so you kind of mini financial statement but in a folder system as opposed to attaching documents and just to kind of add a comment there you know if you guys do want to switch from desktop online that crosses actually quite seamless and you can actually go to a go to the company button and go bot go to the bottom and says export it's online and that process is automatic and you retain all the history so you know that's why we chose to funk with some quickbooks online because you know we have a lot of companies in Canada they use QuickBooks desktop and the integration I should start the transition to do is seamless and it retains all that sort of data so that's what we like about it you can't go back you can't go back online to desktop that's right unless you're on your online yes we do now with online but with the desktop version yes so here's a question just sort of a general question about organizational culture so you know we're talking specifically about ways to upload receipts and stuff like that but then moving out to a like a broader kind of people to people perspective what can nonprofits do to encourage everyone on the team to make audit proof bookkeeping a priority I think it's got to start from the top as in the board and so that speaks to our point of having a knowledgeable board because if the board doesn't even know what they want then the IDI won't know what they want etc etc and so from a cultural aspect perspective you know you got it's gotta start with a the treasurer even or the chairperson to say but we want to have clean books that's our priority why because our donors rely on us to me we are stewards of their finances and one of the ways we do that is making sure that we have clean audit books clean and audited books so I would say you know it's a priority that the board needs to have and then that priority gets communicated to the executive director and then to the bookkeeper and then and from that point on you'll you know you'd have internal property neutral controls monthly reviews quarterly check-ins and so on and so forth okay we have a question from Marian about using sage and I'm not sure if you all can speak to a different accounting platform than QuickBooks but do you know if sage has the same ability to upload receipts I don't know I we don't use sage okay I don't know if they did it but I don't know yeah but that being said what you can do is actually use things like receipt bank or Expensify independently of sage right you can still digitize receipts and create expense reports and just file them away either in the system or in in your folder but just do the record-keeping and sage separately okay Kathy asks is there a way for the book people bookkeeper to pay bills electronically via online banking instead of by cheque because there isn't the accountability of two to sign yeah so we actually don't even recommend paying bills through online banking because that that gives the bookkeeper access basically unlimited access to the the charity's banking and then again comes back to the our first point of removing the temptation we want to remove temptation from these bookkeepers so they don't have us they don't have access to the cash nor do they have access to online banking so we recommend using a third-party software one we recommend is called way pay another one is called Pluto PL o OTO and we have a lot of charities that offer actually also use tell pay all those three systems connect to the bank account and in that connection process you need fuel signatures and then and then you can have multiple authorities so let's say the bookkeeper initiates the payment and the board members will get an email to go ahead and check their portal and then at that moment moment they can they can approve or not approve or ask questions to that process and once to perform to board members approved that actual transaction money just then automatically goes out so Katie asks and and I understand why she's asking this she says is there a general consensus that QuickBooks is the best accounting software to use and why and so I will just hedge here a bit and say we as as a nonprofit organization ourselves know that QuickBooks is a very effective and popular digital platform but it's certainly not the only one out there and this webinar is not intended to be a sales pitch for everyone to go out and buy QuickBooks but we wanted to basically just speak to a tool that many people are using in the hopes of giving them some best practices to get the most effective use out of that tool so all of that kind of hedging aside if if this is your preferred tool can you explain why why it is what you know what the functionality that makes it better and what are some of the challenges that are within this this particular platform yeah that's right I bet I would totally agree with you QuickBooks is not the only solution it's just that it's just a solution that legacy Advantage has has chosen and it's one platform that we use for almost all of our clients and so it comes down to the it comes down to efficiency you know we don't want to be experts in sage and QuickBooks we just want to be experts in wine and be really really good at that sorry you had a follow-up question Oh what what are some of the challenges that you've encountered or some of the functionality that you you have seen that QuickBooks that either you know is lacking or is in the process of adding or glitches or anything like that not for not for profits but profit oriented once there's some progress billing and whatnot which is coming soon but not for profits I think it it does a pretty good job yeah and I I when I first started off I had to choose a software to go in and I just felt that QuickBooks Online is a cloud-based software which allows better cooperation and allows for integration with other apps so you know QuickBooks desktop doesn't in a weight with nearly as many applications such as Pluto away pay grotessa you know receipt bank Expensify so all those integrations can help you create a very digitized process right so for us that efficiency was a really big component that's one of the reasons why we chose it in terms of deficiency is like it Jeanne said there's not one thing--that specific to nonprofits that QuickBooks is not good at but rather you know the payroll module is pretty weak in QuickBooks Online so we actually I don't you run payroll through QuickBooks Online is that we use your things like pay works to outsource that Piro to a payroll software provider to to streamline that process so Sal is asking the their nonprofit is looking to add to hire an office person should we be looking for someone with no Quickbook experience some experience or fully knowledgeable with QuickBooks and I guess broadly the question would be is this something you know is family familiarity with this particular platform a must when hiring is it something that people can be trained on or is it something secondary and not not necessary to hire for yeah that's a great question um it's to me it's not as simple as that though I think obviously want a bookkeeper that understands bookkeeping or an office manager that understands bookkeeping but the the next important thing is how good are they at software in general at picking up software so they can be great at bookkeeping but they might say you look I've always used Sage I will never use anything else so you want someone that's flexible if is somewhat computer literate and adaptable quickbooks online is easy to learn so that's not the most important thing right I know it add to that and I think powering an office manager I think it's more important is their knowledge of charity accounting more so than the software because you know the software is just a tool right garbage in garbage out if you know how to use it then it's going to be really awesome if you don't you know it doesn't doesn't really impact you the more most important thing is that they understand charity accounting and know how to account for things like restricted funds you know classes and all those kind of things so that's the most important piece because at the end of the day you know every accounting software has a journal entry function so even if they don't know how to use majority features they can always they can always enter general entry mm-hmm we have another question about way pay and does way pay work with the QuickBooks desktop if it doesn't is there an alternative I think it does yeah we were at our conference and and they said that they they do we haven't test that feature out yet because we're mainly using QuickBooks Online but that's what they said they did so Ramon has another desktop question if all of the records and bookkeeping happens in mall in for an organization with multiple sites should they maintain multiple desktop versions by site or should it all be centralized in one location so I think it really depends on organizational structure so if this entity has is one registered entity with five locations then it should all be in one file wait the location feature turned on so desktop Oh does have to stop do they not have location from okay so here's another reason why you should use Google clients online couldn't online it kind of has two dimensions one is it classes the other dimension is locations so you could have locations and cost is kind of on the X and y axis and so if you have five different locations you have save the same file I'd highly recommend that because legally it is one entity right and in terms of the acts of bookkeeping again if we use quickbooks online you can actually have five drew people login into quickbooks at the same time you know one from each location doing their own bookkeeping but all in one system so that's another benefit of having a a cloud-based accounting software right and that's that's the advantage of using cloud-based anything really free with organizations with more than one or two people is the ability to work in real time collaboration that's right I have actually seen a hack with QuickBooks desktop where you would upload the QuickBooks desktop to a remote server and then you have five people remoting in from different locations so that works as well so it's it's kind of a you know cloud 1.0 if you if you will have to use includes desktop into multiple location environment let's see I'm just going through some of the comments that we've received so far I think we've done a pretty good job of covering if not specific questions then sort of broad strokes for you know people who are interested in in doing this somebody's asking if TechSoup Canada will be providing discounts for QuickBooks Online anytime soon we don't know that's QuickBooks as a donor partner and there's definitely a demand for it so we hope that that happens in the future but we can't commit to it yet but we do offer we do offer access to QuickBooks desktop which you can access by going to TechSoup Canada that CA and go into our product catalog and sorting by donor partner and going through into it and into QuickBooks Bob and gene as we filter through some of the remaining questions are there any is there any any other topics you'd like to cover or best practices or sort of general advice or specific comments based on what we've talked about today not thinking of any yeah you know we talked about how to make the books audit proof that's basically an assumption that you are already going through an audit or if you are planning to go through an audit in our experience we found that if you sometimes that review is sufficient it's much less prep work it's less much less costly and so if you want you can have a conversation with the board and say look we've been doing audits in the past it's costing about ten thousand a year what if we did a review because we've had clean audits for the past three or four years maybe we could save some time save some cost so that's an option as well for you to mention to your board yeah and it's in terms of documentation it's a but it's it's the same you still follow the same procedure and and documentation and and accounting process of all of that but it just lets just less onerous for for everybody right all right well I think that's a great note to go out on we really appreciate Bob and Jean that she took your time out of your day to share knowledge with us it was certainly informative and I'd like to thank everyone who's joined us today for taking time out of your day so just a reminder that we'll be posting the recording of the webinar along with slides and a recap to our website by next Monday probably earlier than that at least for the recording and the slides everyone if you're still with us please do fill out the brief post webinar survey that will launch right after this session if you have any additional questions or if you would like Bob and Jean to get in touch with you or us at TechSoup Canada if you have any other questions that's a great platform for sharing it as well so once again thank you everyone who's joined us and please enjoy the rest of your day and the holiday season