Data & Stuff // Neil Houston

This is my response to Publishing Itemised Local Authority Expenditure Advice, unfortunately the captcha appears to be broken when I attempted to post this.

These are just my personal thoughts, and may be incorrect, and they do not represent the thoughts of my employer.

Supplier Identification
I disagree with the phrase ‘Ideally publication would include the Companies House number (or equivalent in the case of foreign companies) or Charity registration number‘. This depends on the quality of data entered into the system, in my experience such level of detail (at least for private sector companies) is never recorded in a Supplier master. You will have the Supplier Name, Internal Supplier ID, Address fields, basic contact details (with a CRM system likely to be holding more details).

Such information is not easy to populate into a system if it’s not already present, I remember a case where we had to identify Dun&Bradstreet numbers for every supplier – it wasn’t an easy job.

I would say, this boils down to one thing – why do you require that level of information, what is wrong with the company name after all unless we are talking about data quality issues?

I’d also be wary of needing to publish the actual contact details for each company, depending how a companies supplier master is setup, you may have the contact details for the person in Accounts Payable. What use is that to the end user? It would need to be researched to understand exactly what data is present etc.

Payroll/Benefits
Dependent on how the Supplier master is setup, it is possible for employee expense reimbursements to be present (i.e every employee is setup as a vendor). Most systems allow you to identify these, not all do though. So it may be possible to anonymise these.

Payroll, at the General Ledger level is likely to be a few entries (the transactions hitting the GL Payroll account, and the bank account), the Payroll data of actual payments (BACS likely) may be held separately to that of where normal supplier payments are made (again, dependent on system structure – I’ve seen them a few ways).

Overall
The other thing to remember, is that in some cases, the data output is likely to be:

01/01/2010
CHQ
£2256.89
A1 Company
INVXYZ002 (or some document reference)
GL CODE
GL Description (i.e Transportation)
Cost Centre Code
Cost Centre (Parks Department).

The above shows that the Parks department paid A1 Company, £2256.89 on -01/01/2010, for a service that the invoice was booked to transportation, and the cost absorbed through the parks department budget.

You’d be surprised how many times there are some systems where it’s not totally easily to identify the payment, back to the relevant invoice (apart from a manual reconciliation), you need to know the invoice side of the transactions – as that is where the cost will be booked to (as the payment details will just be crediting cash, debiting Accounts Payable).

It all depends what level of detail you want to show, it’s easy enough to show a payment went out (but associated services, dependent on the internal reporting functions of the system – may be harder).

These are just my thoughts, from my experiences of working with a multitude of different financial systems from your SAP, to your BAAN and SunSystem.

Last year I discussed some of the tools I was finding useful for running my company. This post is an extension of that and discusses how things have changed now.

The biggest change is regarding finances, and how we handle them. Previously we had used Freshbooks for our Invoicing needs, and also used it to track expenses. This worked to a degree, but due to the nature of our revenue streams we had items that were ‘off book’ and we couldn’t account for them in FB, instead a variety of spreadsheets and other tools were needed to keep on top of everything.

The issue we were finding was two fold,
1) Proper tracking of all our revenue streams and being able to segment our expenses into P/L accounts with decent breakdowns, budgettng etc. [And not just things we had invoiced].
2) And how much have we spent, over time by category.

It’s not to say that Freshbooks doesn’t work well. I could easily see how if you were a freelancer, and doing timetracking, and rebilling expenses to clients that it suits your needs. For us, we needed accounting details, and thought it was time to see what else was out there.

There are variety of SaaS web accounting packages out there, and the one we went for was Xero. A personal recommendation secured it, easily when it was referred to as ‘idiot proof’ - perfect for my needs.

Quite simply Xero allows us to have information about our bank accounts (including paypal), and set up automatic rules for dealing with transactions that are not Accounts Receivable/Invoiced based (i.e Google Adsense earning, users buying subscriptions, and clothing orders).

For FY11 we will be able to setup our budgeting, and have one or two views that really give us an overview into how the ‘business’ is running.  All we want is for Kitecrowd to get into the black, and with Xero we now have much more of an idea as to what our core expenses truly are, and what those ‘one off costs’ of year one really amount to.

Due to Xero being able to handle our Invoicing needs, we will be dropping Freshbooks. It’s certainly worth a look though if you use other accounting packages, and l’d strongly suggest testing the market – only by trying things will you know what will allow you an effective workflow.

I’d also like to say how good the service is from Freshbooks, and Xero. A welcome from Xero, and an enquiry from Mike McDerment Freshbook CEO about what I was finding hard with expenses, and why I’m switching. So Mike, this is for you – you guys rock, and served my needs well, but you just at this moment in time don’t allow me to get enough information about how my business is operating.

On an aside, Xero can integrate with Freshbooks, but we are a small company, and can’t afford to be paying for two solutions that handle Invoicing/Expenses. When one of them also handles the rest of our accounting functions, maybe this will change in the future, maybe it won’t. Either way Freshbooks it’s been fun using you.