Re: [802SEC] Q1 IEEE 802 LMSC Data in NetSuite.

[Geoff Thompson <thompson@ieee.org>]

Ben-

Good summary but I think you left something out of your list.  When Clint described the situation to us he said that other groups farmed out most of their services and included the money handling in that outsourcing.

I would assume that would go something like the following:

    - It would include money handling (collecting funds, paying for services, executing contracts) and accounting services in the meeting management contract.

    - The technical group (e.g. 802) would get a single payment or bill per plenary that would go into the IEEE consolidation banking account.

I believe such an arrangement should be added to your list.

There is an inherent bias in IEEE requirements that we have not discussed.   That is, many IEEE technical groups use IEEE's own meeting services and/or consolidate standards meetings with other IEEE events.  That produces a situation for other groups where the effort involved with transactions is often buried in the overhead of other operations which come out IEEE budgets elsewhere.

If there is some way that we could include some details and provision of this in our discussion list, it would be good.

Geoff Thompson

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 10:41 AM, Benjamin A. Rolfe <ben@BLINDCREEK.COM> wrote:

Adrian, and all,

I agree with Adrian that we may need professional help ;-).  I agree we should investigate, get an estimate on the cost, prior to making a decision. Then we should consider the impact  on our membership. Adding opex ot 802 will ultimately have to be paid by the membership via meeting fees or other indirect effects that raise the cost of participation.    

We should not forget that this expense is overhead created by the poor fit of the IEEE mandated tools with the operation of 802, and decisions by IEEE such as not opening a programmatic interface so that tedious repetition could be automated.

I see several options for action:
  1.  We can simply accept this as the cost of being part of IEEE.
  2. We could present to SASB and IEEE leadership our findings, pointing out that this cost is due entirely to the choice of tools mandated by IEEE.
  3. We could review our operating procedures and see if we can better adapt our operations to the mandated tools.
  5. We could simply do nothing and see if SASB is prepared to stop 802 from holding meetings.

Note I removed "continue to whine at IEEE about the magnitude of stupid" from the list, though we can perhaps include a variation as part of (2).

If 802 is in fact so unique as to be the only sponsor in IEEE-SA struggling to use NetSuite, I would find (3) rather compelling.  Being honest, our experience so far with NetSuite leaves me completely out of ideas for (3).

Being a the sort of fellow that believes that the quality of information affects the quality of decisions, I'd like to know how other sponsors have coped and see if we can learn from others' experiences. I have asked the staff trying to help us how other groups are  fairing with NetSuite but I don't think people we have been interacting know. Perhaps if the request came for SASB it might find it's way to the right folks?   Perhaps this will help us apply professional help with less cost.

regards and happy pondering.
Ben

On 7/22/2015 9:37 AM, Stephens, Adrian P wrote:

Dear EC,

While we can rail at the unfairness of it all,  that will have no effect.   The SASB came a hair's width from resolving to instruct us to hire an accountant to do this work.

Notwithstanding that I spoke against this part of the resolution,  before I got booted out of the room,  I think we should not be using our volunteer resources to do repetitive and time-consuming admin.

I would be supporting of getting an accountant in to take over the parts that are time consuming asap.   If anybody needs a motion to that effect,  I'll make it.

Best Regards,
 
Adrian P STEPHENS
 
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-----Original Message-----
From: ***** IEEE 802 Executive Committee List ***** [mailto:STDS-802-SEC@ieee.org] On Behalf Of James P. K. Gilb
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:13 PM
To: STDS-802-SEC@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG
Subject: Re: [802SEC] Q1 IEEE 802 LMSC Data in NetSuite.

Clint

Hmm, part of me says we should just tell them that they need to attach the bank statement (which I am guessing they get) to each credit card transaction.  Just refuse to do it because they are being silly.

If they think that is too much effort for IEEE-SA or IEEE to do, then maybe they should re-think NetSuite.

So, I suggest we draft a letter telling them that the 802 Treasurer nor any 802 funded individual will _not_ be doing this and if they want it done, they need to pay, out of their own funds, to have it done.

IMHO.

James Gilb

On 07/21/2015 10:40 AM, Clint Chaplin wrote:

Dear all,

It turns out there is an additional IEEE requirement to attach 
supporting documentation to every transaction $1,000 and above.  This 
has not been done yet, but I will be working away at it.

However, there is currently no way to automate this process in 
NetSuite; it requires someone to manually touch every transaction 
$1,000 and above to attach the documentation.  The upload template 
that IEEE is looking into for us, will be incapable of doing such documentation attachment.

This is a problem for IEEE 802 LMSC.  For example, many of our credit 
card deposits are $1,000 and above.  I just did a survey of IEEE 802 
LMSC's finances for the first half of 2015, and 206 out of 322 
transactions are
$1,000 or more.  The only documentation that I have for credit card 
deposits are the monthly Wells Fargo checking account statement and 
the monthly credit card merchant account statement.  Given an envelope 
calculation, I will essentially be attaching the exact same documents 
to approximately 30 transactions each month.  Manually.

This is not a problem for 2015, in that we did receive special 
dispensation for 2015 only to consolidate similar transactions on a 
monthly basis.  But for 2016, I may just quit rather than face the 
effort that is being required upon us.

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 7:46 PM, Clint Chaplin 
<clint.chaplin@gmail.com>
wrote:

FYI

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Clint Chaplin <clint.chaplin@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 7:43 PM
Subject: Re: 1Q 2015 data in NetSuite-due by 7/31/2015
To: Diane Mistretta <d.mistretta@ieee.org>, Paul Nikolich < 
p.nikolich@ieee.org>, Yatin Trivedi <Yatin.Trivedi1@synopsys.com>, 
Karen Kenney <k.kenney@ieee.org>
Cc: Juanita Lewis <juanita.lewis@ieee.org>


Dear all,

All known financial data for IEEE 802 LMSC for the first quarter of 
2015 has been entered into NetSuite.  The data for the 2015-01 
Atlanta and
2015-03 Berlin departments has been finalized, but are not verified 
nor audited.  The data for the other departments has not been 
finalized, verified, or audited.  2015 Berlin is missing one 
transaction that I cannot enter as an account payable because I do not even know the amount.

All bank statements for the first quarter have been reconciled.
Reconciled only verifies that the correct amounts are present; 
reconciliation is no guarantee that the transactions have been put 
into the correct accounts.


--
Clint (JOATMON) Chaplin
Principal Standards Engineer
Samsung R&D Institute America

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