On a whim I cranked out version 0.9 of TempWorks GL/AP in the summer of 1997. In retrospect, the time would have been better spent during that heady bubble period tightening up our search and retrieval processes. Heck, considering that for a long time almost no one expressed the remotest interest in the modules, the time would have been better spent taking the kids to the beach.
We do the dumbest things when we have too much time on our hands, and fortunately I’ve had great customers to keep me from having that problem too often during the years. I shelved the GL/AP work in ‘97 to fix an A/R crisis at a
But my GL/AP distraction of 1997 hasn’t gone totally wasted, and in fact we took it off the shelf and gave it a dusting – ok, maybe an overhaul – and implemented it internally at TempWorks itself this spring. We did it to gain better control over our spending which as a company that has grown from 20 to almost 40 people in the last year was no longer being well governed by the QuickBooks system we were on.
With the new AP system, we have instant, enterprise access to bills awaiting payment and can control those payments with an integrated approval process. We can quickly view reports on how much we’ve paid vendors and for what. I’m no longer waiting for our CPA firm to get an understanding of spend.
The GL gives us real-time access to financial statements and cash flows. Everything flows automatically from the other TempWorks modules, so we’re saving time previously spent reentering data into QuickBooks. My CPA firm still maintains its own books on us, but that’s for tax preparation purposes only and the amount of information transported back and forth is minimal. I’m currently writing the Cash Management portion of the system that will facilitate bank reconciliations and allow us to project cash needs in the coming months. We have no debt so the net result of this is simply that we invest our cash better rather than keeping it around just-in-case.
I’ve written before about how eating-our-own-dog-food has helped us serve our customers better, and this in-house GL/AP project has emerged as yet another example. The four or five people who have touched the project have learned a lot about doing a GL/AP conversion and accounting in general. They will take on GL/AP conversion projects with confidence from the experience. We’ve upgraded the GL export engine as well which should help us serve those with an external GL.
