Sage 100

Do any of you have a customer using some type of patient trust fund software? One of my customers is about to take on the management of 100 individuals where they track their monthly income and also what is spent (think group home residents). I know that we could probably: - Job Cost - UDF Each have their own pros and cons. I'm wondering if you have a customer using anything outside of Sage to track these financial amounts?

They could use a GL segment (department for each individual). That could eliminate job cost and having to modify reports to track by UDF.

The concern is that adding accounts or departments doesn't scale particularly well since delete/renumber/merge presents other issues.

We did that in BusinessWorks at one time using department to keep track of the individuals. I'd think you could do something similar in MAS as Jeff is suggesting.

Very true, but it may be the lesser of all evils. You would have to maintain the UDF table and be sure that you enter the UDF value for every transaction plus modify your financial reports. Don't even want to begin with using the JC module issues.

What happens when the initial 100 people become 1,000. And these people turn over. Five years out you have a huge GL with lots of departments - half of which are not used but hold data. I believe this works - it's the scaling and management of the growth that has me afraid. Your chart of accounts could grow to be very very large and unmanageable.

Couldn't you reuse departments, perhaps after a year of no activity? Or use the wonderful JC module....

Well if it does become a 1,000, they will have bigger issues to deal with. I have a NFP client that used to use Blackbaud and went with MAS because it was 30K less than MFP and they have this issue with tracking grant income/expense by grant year. I would have used a UDF but there was no way for it to work with PR (130 employees) So every year, they have to add a bunch of accounts and make a bunch inactive. Something they felt they could live with.

We also have a NFP client who purchased Blackbaud then dumped it and started using Job Cost to track grants, etc. (They already had MAS GL and AP.)

Hmmmm. Interesting!!!!!!

I have a NFP client that uses job cost to do tracking on grants. They never enter anything directly into JC (other than new grants), and it's working OK for them. If they don't already have JC, I'd probably just do a UDF and some scripting.

We have two NFPs on MAS 90 with the group home situation who are using GL as @JeffSchwenk described and are happy with it

Thanks everyone - the GL and UDF options were the first that I mentioned. I also believe that they're not optimal for growing organizations because they tend not to scale (I've had experience using both in an accounting environment). I'm thinking Job Cost may be the least expensive interim solution.