Glenda Anderson
Date of interview: June 28, 2016
For community trusts, accurate accounting and reporting is vital. There’s plenty which can go wrong with finances and not a lot of money to spend on fixing issues – so things need to be right first time.
For a trust, business accounting software needs to be easy to use, cost efficient, and provide everything in a way that is understandable. For these reasons, Glenda Anderson has used CashManager in five different community trusts for more than 15 years.
Easy to use, easy to understand.
Working in finance and administration with community trusts in Northland, Glenda Anderson knew that often the trustees didn’t need anything fancy, they needed the information presented to them in a way that they could understand. CashManager provided that ease of understanding.
“For the smaller trusts I find the reporting system is excellent, very simple in working with and producing reports,” said Ms Anderson.
Still, the ease of use didn’t mean that anything got missed out.
“You get all the detail you need. And spitting out GST reports – it’s dreamsville.”
Over the years, Ms Anderson had also tried using Xero and MYOB, but found that they were much harder to use and didn’t produce the results she wanted.
“Some of the reporting systems of the other ones are ridiculous. They don’t serve the trustees; they serve accountants,” she said.
While Ms Anderson enjoyed the speed and convenience of being able to import data to CashManager straight from bank statements and accounts, she also appreciated being able to enter data by hand without any difficulty.
“I love it – it’s does what you want, it’s simple for everyday Joe Bloggs and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand what it’s telling you. Whereas the other two, I’d have thrown them out the window.”
The cost-effective solution.
Working with community trusts, cost was a major part of the equation. Ms Anderson stressed that any accounting software a trust used had to be appropriate for the size of the organisation and its needs.
“You have to think about the accounting packages you get because with most trusts you can’t get funding for admin overheads and things like that,” she said.
“One of the accounting packages [one of the trusts] was using cost thousands which they couldn’t really afford.”
She found that CashManager always provided value for money and when teaching other people to use the system it didn’t take much extra time.
“Teaching others, they hook onto it really quickly.”
Using CashManager allowed the trusts to not have to rely so much on using accountants, which could get expensive.
“It allows you to be independent as a trust. It’s very appealing for smaller organisations.”
Ms Anderson said that the extra money was important. “It’s not all about profit and loss, it’s about having the money to spend on social needs.”
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