Sage 100

Have a prospect from the Non Profit world looking to move off QB. Takes her three days to do a P & L by fund. My question is this - Has anyone ever used job cost to track this information for the fund. I think this would be an ideal solutions as JC would be a natural to track income and expenses across multiple fiscal years. Thoughts?

My nonprofit clients generally don't use job cost. We make sure each grant/program has a unique department number. We close the annual net asset change each year to a unique net asset account connected with that department. We use F9 to do the multi-year reports by grant/program, to do grant reporting, and to prepare financial statements.

There are a few problems with non-profit accounting that make Sage 100 a bad choice. A. Often the reporting (either now or in the future) is based on multiple differing fiscal years -- for example fund 1 could report based on 6/30, fund 2 based on 12/31. And, yeah if you say ""that will never happen here"" ... it's even more guaranteed... B. Each fund is essentially a self balancing chart of accounts -- you can technically do this with Sage 100 and AJE -- though it won't scale past a few funds. The first time the fund gets out of balance and they are in a rush to reconcile at year end it will be a nightmare. C. At some point they may want to integrate to fundraising which Sage 100 ERP doesn't offer D. Grant tracking might fit into Job Cost - though I think you'd be stretching to get out the reports that might be needed -- and just hope that nobody asks for fancy financial reporting based on that job cost data. That's not to say that non-profits cannot use Sage 100 -- it's just riskier if they are growing and/or going to expand in the future because they may find the workarounds that they start with become more cumbersome down the road.

What is the fate of Job Cost anyway?

I agree with @WayneSchulz comments for larger nonprofits. I find Sage 100 works well for small nonprofits.

We have many non-profits using Sage 100, and last year one of them chose it over MIP based on great references from other non-profit clients. One of our large non-profit clients about 7 years ago was planning to use Job Cost because they were not getting the fund reports they needed, and the new controller at that time had worked with Job Cost. I told her that most of our clients were structuring GL differently in terms of the segments and using FRx for the reporting. They were not yet on 4.00, so I had them upgrade to take advantage of the expanded account number and segments. We wrote the FRx fund statements and they have been very happy with the result. Of course, we are now reviewing Sage BI with them.

I have a non-profit that uses SAGE ERP 100. They use the General Ledger Custom Financial Reports to print their monthly ""fund"" reports and cost center reports. At year end, like @RonGouveiaCPACITP said the net asset change (for ALL funds) gets posted to the General Fund (Retained Earnings) account. The Finance Manager (a CPA) then makes manual journal entries to re-allocate the net asset change to individual Fund Balance Accounts (by Department). When SAGE drops support of GL Custom Financial Reports they will need F9 or SMI or something. They are using Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge as their fundraising system and it is not connected to SAGE ERP 100.

I talked to my non-profit audit partner, and the same non-profit I referred to also uses Job Cost for every fund for all receipts and disbursements, similar to what you outlined @JeffSchwenk . Let me know if you want to talk with them about how it is working.

Thanks all. Job Cost seems like a natural solution for non profits. Everything could flow through JC making report writing with Crystal (or Excel Pivot tables) a natural. The transfer to net asset reclassification would still be a bit of a challenge. This could alleviate the need to set up new accounts everytime a fund is added. If you still wanted to track the fund number in the GL, you could create a UDF to store the information, then run the PIVOT table to create a fund statement. One day I'll learn SMI (probably Biznet first). Maybe it will be sooner than later. OR you could create an Access PTQ to run your Crystal reports. Heck, with Pivot tables and PTQ's, the sky is the limit..........

@JohnHoyt - if the process goes far enough, I will call to discuss. May want to use your client as a reference. for the concept.

Look at that - @JeffSchwenk mentioned Pivot tables twice in one post!!

Just for you @ThereseLogeais , I edited my comment so that I mention Access PTQ's also...........

Follow the word of @JeffSchwenk !!

Sage 100 can work well, especially if NFP is an enterprise. We have an association (marketing organization) that uses JC for budgeted projects. We have a quasi-government agency that uses TC/PR/JC to manage property improvements and rental events. We had another association that managed resale inventory. As with all systems, it just depends.

@JeffSchwenk We have NFP clients using Sage 100 ERP but many more using Sage 100 Fund Accounting (MIP). If you would like to discuss the strengths and weaknessess of each in a NFP enviroment feel free to give me a call. We have 100's of NFP clients as that has been a focus area for us over last 15 years.

We also have a non-profit client using job cost to track their funds. They previously used hundreds of GL accounts to track each fund, but now are able to do all of their reporting through job cost and as far as I can tell it works great. The client needs to post expenditures to a different fund once they reach their ""budget"", so we also tried to use a JC enhancement that would compare the JC estimate (budget) to the JTD costs during data entry. This would have worked great except for the fact that it didn't account for future postings and this client is not closing on a timely basis. We could have had the enhancement re-written to account for future postings, but the client decided to just use reports to track their fund balances which is working well.

I'm thinking if I am going to pitch a MAS solution, it will have to have JC with it. Prospect is currently tracking 100 active funds and each have about 75 expense categories. Doing the math, this equates to a Shxx load of GL accounts to create plus many to add every time a new fund comes on line.

For our marketing association, we added eRequester with their GL Budget module which gives visibility to actual and expenditures submitted but not yet approved. AP invoices are entered in eR and passed to AP IDE. We also push out JC reports to managers (budget owners) for further visibility.

Great thought! When I raised the possibility of PO's and visibility, that was ""shot"" down, but I had overlooked eRequester. Will keep that in the back pocket for the next meeting.

I am not familiar with eRequester. How seamless is the interface to MAS and what is the price range?

Some brochures on it. Software plus implementation could easily run north of 20K. My client invested about 25K for completed project.

Here is Rob's contact information.

Our client has spent north of Jeff's client's investment. Many options in function and cost. Do a thorough due diligence on workflow and process. Much more challenging to manage expectations because it may affect so many more users in the organization.

Totally agree with Bob. My client has a five user MAS license and a 20 user eRequester license. Client has three locations is very heavy into a service industry where their isn't a lot of receiving of goods going. They were dying in the paperwork shuffle. They spent just at a year ramping up the solution. Client is quite happy with their investment.

Thanks for the info. I do not have anyone currently looking for this, but see where it could be very beneficial and was not aware of a ""MAS"" integrated solution.

Awesome solution for a service type company that is choking on paper.