Meeting transcript
BOS & BOE Special Meeting
May 19, 2020 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Everybody, there's not that many people that are online, but I'd like to ask them if they'd like to do some public speak. We can get started.
Okay. So I just started recording the meeting. And would you like me to go through the board members or just the non board members?
I would go through the non board members. I mean, board members can speak anytime they choose to. Okay.
Okay. So Lisa Hopkins, I'm trying to unmute you. If you would like to participate in public speak, please unmute yourself. Thank you. Okay. Melissa Lateska? All set, thank you. Thank you. Krista or Bonnie? I'm all set, thank you. Thank you. Jamie Weber? I'm all set. Thanks. Thank you. Kimberly Prasan? All set. Thank you.
Thank you. Okay, Shannon, we can see you now. Yep. Now did I miss anyone from the public? I see Nick Levine.
Oh, so Nick is from CVC. He's obviously welcome to participate. Sorry. He's here to broadcast.
Did you just ask Christa Caraboni? Yes. Okay. And Sally Doyen. Sally, are you there? Yes, I'm here. I'm good. Sally can speak anytime she wants by the way. Thank you. There anyone else that we should call on?
That's it. Okay, that sounds good. We're done with public speak. Let's move on to item agenda three, financial software upgrade discussion. I'll go to Eric. Eric, do you have anything that you want to get started with before this? And then we'll move to
Laura and see if she wants to say anything before we get started with the presentations.
No, I just wanted to say that the software committee looked at several options. And one of the considerations we had was QuickBooks, but we really didn't have somebody to kind of explain how that would happen and what that transition would look like. So we through our auditor linked up with Mrs. Miller and Mrs. Miller will hopefully today give us talk the combined boards through what it would look like if we chose QuickBooks as an option for the financial software.
Okay Laura do you want to say anything before we get started? No I'm good. You'll hear plenty from me next
on my part. Okay. Just a quick question Jeff if you don't mind. Sure. This sounds like something that should have been presented to the committee that's collecting the software. Why is this being presented to both boards? Doesn't seem to make sense if they're trying to decide what to pick. Why do we need to weigh in on this? We're not being presented with every software option, just apparently QuickBooks. No. Why are we listening to this at all?
Because it's a point in time where we can sit there and get some information to you, Steve, to sit there and see if this makes sense. You have some softwares like BMSI, I believe that's the term for that one, and some others that you've looked at that I've gotten information on. And as a board of selectmen, we decided to call this meeting to try to get you some additional information.
Okay. I didn't understand where we kind of fit in with the software selection. I thought that was the review of the committee.
The other item on the agenda is the the discussion about the combined, position.
No. And that makes sense. That's what I was curious about. I didn't understand why we were doing the software, but okay. Just wanna check. Thanks. Well, I mean, I think the part that's missing here is that,
obviously, with COVID happening and it kinda made it a little harder to do some of the some of the meetings at the at the point where the the last meeting happened with the the software committee, we still hadn't sorted out the QuickBooks situation. We're supposed to go do an in person meeting with another town that has it, and that wasn't able to be put together. And so the software committee wasn't really able to go and see it in person and it's really important that this decision be made because it does affect budget specifically before this budget is kind of blocked in. So for it made the most sense, the board of the board of selectmen was pretty clear what the QuickBooks was their choice but the school obviously has a say in this. So in the interest of transparency, it seemed most prudent to move this along as quickly as possible and present this to everybody at once rather than to a committee and then the committee comes back with a recommendation and then we
so it makes the most sense to go in this direction Given COVID, Just I've never
two comments in that regard. One is or a question of the committee members. Did BMSI and Edmonds have an opportunity to present their presentations as we're gonna hear from QuickBooks to the committee, the software committee?
Yes. The BMSI and Edmonson presented to the task force committee, but not to this larger committee. Right. But they presented to the
financial software committee who is tasked with making a recommendation to the town. So that's my second question. And I think along the lines of what Steve was asking is, was it the the mission of the software committee, so to speak, to assess what the needs for the various financial positions in towns are and then make a recommendation to the town board of selectmen, board of education as to what they believed as committee members was the best financial software to to purchase.
I would say yes that was the the goal of the committee was to do that we only got so far in the process and didn't come to that conclusion
Are there any other questions that anybody wants to sit there and ask before we ask the individual? Sorry. We ask Cheryl to sit there and give us a presentation.
Thank you. My name is Cheryl Miller. I am an accountant in Canterbury. I I use QuickBooks in my accounting office and I have every version known to QuickBooks all the way back to 1999 through 2000. And yes, we still have some clients that like the 1999 version, although it's no longer supported by QuickBooks. They use it very sparingly so they made the option of not upgrading. I was asked to give you some information on how QuickBooks may be able to aid the town and the Board of Education. And I had sent over some documentation. I'm going to assume that you all received it, which was a general outline of tonight, some backup documents, so you would have some visuals on how things potentially could look. And then some costs for QuickBooks. Some how you would set up a user and items of that nature.
Do we all who need them have had access to them. I'll assume a yes. Okay. So QuickBooks, you have a desktop version and or an online version. I am not a fan of the online version. I will make say that right up front. The reports are very limited. Although anybody can access at any time, it's harder to navigate. You can't have multiple screens open at the same time, whereas you can with the desktop. So, gave you two potential scenarios, QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks Premier. Okay? QuickBooks Pro has automatically three users available with the program. QuickBooks Premier Plus has five users available with the program. You can always buy additional users. So what I mean by that is, I know that you're in the process of upgrading your computer system and having a new server. If you went, let's just say with the QuickBooks Premier Plus, installing it on your server is not a user. That is simply where the data is maintained, and all of the separate desktops will feed off of that data. So if you went with the Premier, there's five users. So, that means at any one time, five employees, Board of Education, the town, what have you, whoever is authorized to have access to QuickBooks can be on that system at the same time. One person could be doing payroll if you do in house payroll. One person could be paying bills. One person could be doing a PO.
One person could be printing reports. Now just because you have five, three or five users does not mean that you can't have additional people authorized to be on the QuickBooks. You just can't have more than five on that particular QuickBooks program at a time. So if you had six people that you wanted to be have access to, you would have to buy an additional user access to be able to everyone to be on at once. But if you don't need additional the three or the five automatically come with the price. According to my research currently right now, an additional seat is $299.09 $9 and that's a one time fee unless you upgrade the program. If you upgrade the program, then you would pay the normal whatever the fee is that year for the program and then the additional seat. With QuickBooks, you only have to potentially consider upgrading to a newer version every three years. And only then if you are doing in house payroll. If you are not doing in house payroll, you potentially could use a 2020 version with all of your current seats and users and not upgrade if you chose not to. But they do recommend at least every three years. In three years time, you would have to purchase again another, let's say premier. And if you need six seats, unless they've upgraded and offer you more than the six seats, you would have to purchase an additional seat. Any questions so far on that? No? Okay.
I also sent over and it's attached to my main introduction page information on the users. So after I'm done, I'm sure I'm going to be giving you a lot of information and you'll want to review it again. There is a document attached that talks about the users and how you have to get another user if you go over the number that is purchased with the program. Then you should see, I believe, it's going to say Town of Andover Budget to Actual. That potentially, I was able to get a copy of a eighteen-nineteen budget to actual for the Board of Education. And I started to set up a chart of accounts based on the first page of that document. So you'll see on the document that there is hang on, I'm just going to open up mine for you. You are able to see that you have the same structure as you had in your Phoenix, except for the account number. QuickBooks only has
a seven digit account number. So there is one thing that you'll have to do if you go to QuickBooks, you'll have to map the QuickBooks file for the state of Connecticut. And the state of Connecticut does have a nice mapping feature. And it's not it automatically exports to Excel. Oh, thank you. It exports to Excel. And you would just enter the information in. There's a little bit of an exercise. It'll take just a little bit of time to do. But once it's done, whether it's the town or the Board of Education, you can reuse it year after year. So here, what I did instead because I know that the account numbers are important also for your mapping and for the viewing of your reports. I used 101, which is your certified staff. And then if you notice the last three digits, I used them I'm sorry if you can hear that. I'm having a thunderstorm where I am, so I apologize. I coded the last three digits based on a portion of your report. And then in the description of the line item, I put the remaining portion of the number. The budget currently shown on this report is the appropriated budget. QuickBooks does both appropriated budget and adopted budget. In order to see both, you'd have to do a budget overview, and that will show you your original budget as adopted in July. Adoption date. And then any additional appropriations by month for line item transfers.
In this particular report, you're only going to get the appropriated ballots. So there was a transfer for the teachers. So when I prepared the document, I made sure that the 1,000,001 change agreed to your report. The actual amounts are over to the left of the budget, and then of course you see over budget or under budget, and the percent of the budget. I just wanted you all to have an idea of what the report potentially could look like. Now that's not to say that we can't change, I have seven digits, I only have the seven, but those seven digits could basically be however the board or the town would like and then you can put additional information in the description, if that is what the departments might like. A nice thing about QuickBooks here is you can print a budget to actual report per department. Department. So if you only wanted the department for instrumental assistance, you could print a report for just that department. Or if you wanted to combine a report for all of your one your zero zero zero which is your function code, you wanted to print the report only that,
you can go in and prepare report based on specific criteria in specific accounts. Then the nice other nice thing is you can memorize it. So once you have a report, if it's a report that you're going to use monthly or quarterly, even weekly, you can have a memorized report, you name it what you would like, and then you are able to pull it up, change the date, print it, save it, or just change anything at that time that you might like, re memorize it, or change it after that. The next document I wanted to show you was the audit trail. Nice thing about QuickBooks, the audit trail is on at all times. It can never be shut off. In the earlier versions, you could turn the audit trail on and shut it off at will. Anybody could do it. At this point now, it's always on. How the audit trail works is once a user is signed on and if they have credentials in order to be able to enter information in, It automatically records, as you can see, the date and the time and who entered it. If that person also has the ability to change their own numbers, it will show the original document or the original transaction and then it will also show the change who did the change
person who entered the date and the time. Can't be shut off, it's always there and you find it up in the report section. And I use this report quite often when I'm going to a client if I'm looking for a reason why maybe something no longer reconciles on the bank account and I have a general idea, I can pull this report for a day period, a month period, a week period, any set period that has information in the QuickBooks, I can pull a report and track what might have changed to cause the books to go out of balance. Any questions so far on the budget to actual and or the audit trail? No. Okay. The next report that I sent over or the next document I sent over, yes, was concerning how you set your criteria for your users. So let's, again, assume we're going with the premier. In this case, the admin, that was me at the time, was logged in, and I was setting up a bookkeeper. So you originally set up the bookkeeper's password. They do request every ninety days that that person change the password. Once they that person signs on, they can change their password and go about whatever business they are allowed to provide. As you scroll down, I gave you the normal features that a person can be given. The first thing it asks you, what what areas do you want them to have? In this case, I made sure to select the, select areas. If you have somebody, maybe your treasurer would have full access, someone else may have select, and then it says sales are receivable. Although you don't necessarily
have receivables, the school might have receivables if they are billing out maybe a pre k program that the parents are contributing to. You can be running your invoices through QuickBooks also. You may want somebody to be able to record the transaction, you may not want them to be able to change the transaction and that's where you can set that criteria. Purchase orders, I know that the school uses purchase orders, the town I believe attempts or does use, not quite sure if you use purchase orders or not. QuickBooks does have purchase orders and we'll get into that in a minute, but here also you can set the rights
of that particular person, in this case the bookkeeper, on what they can do with their transaction and what they cannot do within their transaction. Checking and credit cards, although you don't receive probably credit card payments, although you probably do for your tax collector and maybe your town clerk, you can set the access on those types of transactions also, or no criteria. They can have full access. You don't normally have inventory, but that's part of the program. Time tracking. I know I was asked if QuickBooks does do time tracking. Yes, it does. You can track time. You could have somebody enter in the time. And there are several programs that link. QuickBooks has its own separate program that will link an employee's time sheet, right, to QuickBooks. If you decide to do in house payroll, it has that ability to do that also. Payroll employees, time tracking, sensitive accounting. This is where you decide who can see what reports.
Can they change items? Can they not change items? Can they only print? Can they only enter? You get to decide what that person's criteria is. There's additional reporting activities, changing and deleting transactions, which is potentially a large one. Remember though, audit trail on, even if an employee has the ability to delete or change a transaction still going to be recorded in the audit trail. So if someone makes an improper correction, at least you'll be able to track it and decide how you need to fix it going forward. The final accounts screen will be and there's another page, so they only gave me that one snapshot all of the rights of that particular person. You can change them at any time you want. So the bookkeeper has a specific set of criteria, the treasurer or the town administrator decides that this person needs to have additional activities, rights, you can always go back in. The admin can always make changes. Only the admin can change a person's rights within QuickBooks. No one else can. We normally like the admin to be a separate person that's not utilized except to add users, correct users. And I personally like the admin to be the person entering in the budget, maybe making line item transfers or additional appropriations. In this case you might prefer that the treasurer do that. And then once the reports are ready to go to the auditor and if the auditor has any adjusting entries,
the admin person whoever is assigned those rights would then go in and record any adjusting entries that the auditor may have. Any questions so far for that? No? Okay. So some of your I'm going down my list. I have it here on my phone. Limitations for QuickBooks. The seven digit account number certainly can be a concern for the school. I'm not sure whether the town uses a 22 digit account number or not, but they only allow seven digits. I do know some of the other programs that will be looked at tonight also do allow for a longer or a larger set of account numbers. QuickBooks does not. I am not aware of any school districts at this time that are using QuickBooks. I went out and did an extensive search attempting to see if I could find any school districts that were utilizing it, but I did not uncover any. Many of the smaller towns, whether it's in Connecticut or one of the other states do use QuickBooks.
Most of their chart of accounts, trial balance are smaller and don't have as many sub accounts sometimes as the school. But that is what I had found. The chart of accounts does give us the availability though of deciding the account numbers that work best for the town and the Board of Education if that's the route that everyone decides to go. And then you would use the State of Connecticut mapping program. Once you have your account numbers, it would be an Excel spreadsheet that would have the town or the school's chart of accounts in there, including the balance sheet. Balance sheet has to be mapped and uploaded to the state also. And then a separate tab would show the combining effect of the QuickBooks file to an appropriate format that then can be uploaded by itself to the State of Connecticut site. They do fund accounting. It can, but it does not do reciprocal due to, due froms. So what I mean by that, let's say and I don't I'm not picking on the Board of Education or it could be let I won't do that. Let's say the town. Say the town pays an invoice, and that invoice is a combination of normal road maintenance for the town under public works, but also has a capital nonrecurring component. In your Phoenix, when you recorded that transaction, it would automatically record the public works portion of the transaction, but it would set up in the due to, due from of the Phoenix and would automatically go in to the capital not reoccurring fund and record the transaction for that particular asset or what have you that's going to be recorded there. QuickBooks will not do that.
You will have have due to, due froms, whether it's for the school, capital non recurring, any of your smaller funds, your library funds, things of that nature, you'll have to have separate due to, due froms within potentially within your QuickBooks. And then you will have a separate QuickBooks file for those smaller funds. You can group them together. They appear on your audit report under non major funds. You could have multiple QuickBooks files. You could have one QuickBooks file. You can combine QuickBooks files. You could have any number of QuickBooks files that you might like on the system. It just will not do the due to, due from. You would physically have to print the report or have it open, go into the other fund and record those transactions. Purchase orders. QuickBooks will do purchase orders, but it is not ideal. So QuickBooks will allow you to prepare a purchase order, but QuickBooks considers that a non posting transaction. In order for it to show up on your budget to actual, which obviously is very important because that's your mechanism to make sure that departments do not overextend their budget. You potentially might have to have two separate reports, budget to actual reports, and have them memorized. One of the reports is going to show non posted transactions, which are your purchase orders. If you have a non posting transaction within the budget to actual, it will show the total amount of the purchase order. Then once you have paid that purchase order through the pay bills feature, once the bill is received,
you would have to have a separate report that would show paid items. I did try to print a report that showed both non posting and posting items within the QuickBooks, and it doubled the amount. So I put in a transaction for 17,000 as a purchase order, showed it as a non posted transaction. Then I went in and recorded receipt of the invoice for $17,000 went back in, did a posting either or either a non posted or a posting item, and it made that line item look like it had $34,000 of an expenditure, when in truth it only had 17. As I tried to work through the problem, I found that potentially two reports would be necessary, a posting report for one and potentially a non posting report for the other. QuickBooks does also have some other programs that it will sync with. So if you wanted to have the purchase orders prepared and have the department head approve them, you would need to use an outside supplier, another software company. But the same thing will happen once you bring it into QuickBooks. It's still considered a non posting transaction. And you will have to do potentially two separate ports, a non posting transaction and a posting transaction. Does the town utilize purchase orders? Yes. Yes, as far as I know. Okay.
That Eric, is that correct? The answer to that question is no. The town does not use the software system's purchase order function. Okay. So
And by the way, Cheryl, one quick section on that issue on purchase orders. Wouldn't a workaround wouldn't we be able to come to a workaround related to the purchase order question by doing some type of template on a bill to make the purchase order actually enter into the system?
Yes, yes. QuickBooks has automatic you can automatically create a quick an invoice, excuse me, a purchase order. The only issue is, though, that it doesn't automatically send out to a department head to approve it. If you wanted to have a cloud based system potentially where the purchase order was created and then a notice is sent to the approving supervisor, QuickBooks will not do that. You would have to physically print the PO, email it in a PDF or something of that nature to the approving supervisor, and then bring it back in.
Laura, before you get too far down the road because you seem to you're extremely detailed. And to be quite candid, I think you probably lost half of us in the level of detail so sorry. That you've gone into. So I think our focus really that we were looking for was, is there any issues that you see that cannot be addressed fairly easily with you've mentioned some things that are concerns that you've gotta do this or gotta do that. My understanding is with every software, there's gonna be something that you have to change to make it work for your situation.
Is there specific things with QuickBooks that we can't address or they're gonna be a problem? And then I think that's kind of what we're looking for here is sort of a big maybe a broader view of so that we can understand is there something QuickBooks obviously doesn't have a salesperson and that's why we've asked you to kinda give us a presentation. So like for instance with Yeah. I don't personally
think my own opinion. I think that the QuickBooks file certainly can be utilized for both the the town and the school. You are absolutely correct. Not every program is going to give you every wish list that you have and there's always has to be workarounds. I think that I've used BMSI before. It's a good program too. I have never used Edmonds, so I cannot speak to that program. But when I looked at the Board of Education's budget to actual, except for the numbers, and I felt that potentially putting the numbers within the description was potentially a suitable workaround that it should be acceptable. The nice thing too is it can be changed. You know until you physically go live it can be changed. You have a unique opportunity to set up your books and records for something that's going to work for the town, utilize the state of Connecticut mapping tool, and that way you're still in compliance with the state QuickBooks right now if you went to the, the plus, and I think that that might be a benefit for you, even though it's a little bit more money and there is a yearly fee there. They're running a special $2.49, but they have an online backup, which is very important. I wholly believe in backing up your system every day if possible. And QuickBooks has that mechanism to be able to back up
each day. You also potentially want to have an off-site backup too besides the online backup. The yearly fee is $499 for you to be able to have the plus with the all, it says 20 fourseven tech support and the online backup. With the pro, there is some limited support. It is not as good as the higher end. So basically, you're paying an additional $200 in order to have a designated backup system automatically to the web and then designated contact with a person or a person. I cannot guarantee you that it would be someone from The United States. I cannot guarantee you that. But that is available to you. The pro does not have that. They ask you to go out onto the web and try to search for it.
Cheryl, just real quick. Are you saying it's $4.99 for five users? Yes, I am. Thanks. You're welcome. Cheryl, are you available? One
second, Adrian. Cheryl, is that accurate? You're telling us the software is 4 99 or the backup functionality for the software is 4 90 Yes, correct. Which one? Quick
on let me get it for you. It's the one on the bottom. Quickbooks pro Quickbooks premier. Let me get that for you.
Cheryl, did you did you send over an estimate of what the transition would cost us if we were having you to do this?
Yes, I did. I sent it to Eric. The fee for QuickBooks Pro is $299.99 That's a one time fee, three users. If you don't have in house QuickBooks, if you don't have in house payroll, you don't have to upgrade again for three years. But the one I think that potentially would be a better fit because of some of the added features was the QuickBooks Premier Plus. The first year right now was $249 and 95¢. They are currently running a special. I do not know how long that special is. Then it's a yearly fee of $449 Payroll again would be an add on after, if you want to do in house payroll that would be an additional add on. Additional users over five would be $299 Again, if you don't upgrade for three years, you only pay that $299 once to get a sixth user, and you only then would pay $449 under the current pricing for to have it for multiple years.
The proposal you sent to Eric, I thought, unless you sent one that I have not gotten a copy of, had your rates, but I don't believe it actually had an estimate of what it would take to convert.
My My high side is gonna be roughly, if I'm converting both the town and the school, roughly probably between one hundred and fifty hours and two hundred hours, that would be converting, setting up the chart of accounts, setting up the smaller funds, setting up the mapping tool that's going to be required for both the school and the town, Bringing in your $20.20 excuse me, $19.20 trial balance because QuickBooks does give you the availability to print multiple year comparisons. So certainly the 1920 would be important to be able to look at it to see when you're doing your next 2021 which I know you're in the budget process now or 2122. And then helping you set it up and certainly providing some training.
Thinking one hundred and fifty and two hundred hours. The mapping that you're talking about that's to address the seven digit versus the 20 digit? Yes, sir. Okay. So the state has this out there so this isn't necessarily uncommon then?
It's not. They set that up there because really and truly the 22 digit is outside of the financial ability for smaller towns. I have one town that their budget is only $6,000,000 They could not afford a 20,000 or $25,000 program on a yearly basis. They could not afford that. And many other smaller towns could not either. So the state of Connecticut reduced their requirements and allow for the mapping.
Now we had heard, I'm not sure if it was Cheryl or Michael that brought it up, but there was, that the reason that other schools aren't using this is because if you have multiple locations, it's a problem for splitting out multiple locations within QuickBooks?
That would be potentially correct, except you could use classes to split them out. Okay. You only have one location. But if you wanted to have multiple locations, you potentially would have to use it, the class structure, and that's built within the QuickBooks to be able to say I have teachers, right? And then I have teachers at k through eight and I have teachers nine, ten and eleven and I have teachers at twelve. If you had multiple multiple districts.
Okay, that was the only explanation I had heard though as to why it wasn't was because if a school district had more than one school location within it. So if we had a grammar school
and a high school within our reporting that that would get a little more complicated. It would be more complicated, yes. You'd not only go to budget to actual, but you'd also have to separate it by class. Okay. Alright.
So how much does a conversion cost for one hundred and fifty to two hundred of your hours, Cheryl? Roughly, I went with the full 200, about 30,000.
But, Cheryl, if we did some of that work internally after getting a layout from you, we could reduce your number of hours. Correct? Absolutely. Laura, is Barbara on the call also? Yeah, I'm here. I
thought that Laura and Barbara had both kind of already worked through their chart of accounts. So we would really get just kind of maybe want a verification of those, but I thought those had already been worked through. Am I wrong in that Laura or in Barbara? It was started. It was not completed. Barbara?
Yeah. I have my skeleton worked out using the state of Connecticut uniform chart of account instructions. Okay.
And I believe I'm kinda jumping ahead here, but that has 26 digits in it.
Okay. Okay. So, from from my standpoint, Cheryl, you have other communities that that and I know of other communities that do use QuickBooks. Is there any real I mean, besides the numbering and besides potentially some workarounds around purchase orders, I mean, we should be able to find workarounds if we wanted to utilize this for both.
Ms. Yes. Ms. Okay. Yes. I've had 14,000,000 and $15,000,000 towns utilizing QuickBooks. Okay.
And then my question that I'm sure all of the other Board members would like, and I just want to get the answer from you, if we asked you for specific data as to transactions that are in any one account, information right off of QuickBooks is just drill down on that individual item and you could give us the support for that either department or for an individual line item. Ms. Yes. So we as Board members would actually get information that we've really been after and we could get it instantaneously.
It could never be that we can't get that data. Ms. That would be correct. All you have to do is pull up your budget to actual and if you wanted to know what made up any any one line once you have it up you would just open up that that main total and it will give you every single transaction whether it's voided or or what have you, it'll even show you voided transactions.
It will give you every single figure that makes up the total. So every bill that was in there for every vendor or every check that was cut from every vendor that was put in any given line item? Yes, sir. Okay. All right. And then, we we we move, I believe our auditor is on the call. Correct, Michael? Is that accurate? Yes. Right there. Hi, Michael. How are you? Good, Jeff. How are you? Good. Is there, any issues from your standpoint, from an auditor standpoint, related to QuickBooks or the use of QuickBooks for a ton our size? No. Okay. Is there anything that this these two boards should consider from your perspective before we turn it over to the other members that wanna participate
related to the use of QuickBooks? No, I think Cheryl did a good job, you know, mentioning some of the limitations that QuickBooks might have. Again, QuickBooks is used by, you know, thousands of organizations, you know private schools, non profits, you know contractors that work with the government. So I think the important part is if you're looking at a QuickBooks system is the setup and implementation is key and I think you need to spend the time to make sure again that it gets set up correctly moving forward. Okay. All right. Thank you.
If I could one second. If you move forward, my suggestion would be whether it's QuickBooks, BMSI, admins, whichever, maybe be ready for September 1 to go live. That way you have the summer to things are not quite as busy. I know that you both want to do a joint program meaning the town and the school. The town has their normal payroll, the school potentially does not have their teachers back with the larger payroll that would give you all summer long to make sure that things are flowing the way that you want them to do and they're looking appropriate. Gives you a couple of months.
Am I correct in saying that if we looked at this, Michael and Cheryl that, it would also open up our hiring pool of of you know, we're looking at a combined office and our next next part of this is the combined office. If we were to go this route, it will open up our hiring pool because we're we're looking at two different positions, a high level bookkeeper and then obviously a a financial person to oversee that'll open up our our bookkeeping position quite a bit as far as hiring pool.
My answer for that would have to be yes. Depending on the other programs, I don't know if there's any certification for admins or if there are certification for BMSI. And I'm sure the ladies that are going to present next hopefully or can get that information for you. QuickBooks does have a pro advisor program. They also have different certifications that you can get. You could also test your applicants, see what their knowledge is, things of that nature. But more people use QuickBooks potentially than some of the other programs, in my opinion. Michael, anything? I would agree with what Cheryl said. Okay.
All right. Cheryl, thank you. Do any of the board members have specific questions that they want to address to Cheryl or Michael and we can you know, we don't have to keep them on for the rest of the meeting if they choose not to, but anyone?
I just wanted to get just just Jeff a kind of a final understanding because I'm sure we're gonna just hear the purchase of a financial software system cost x amount of dollars. So when you say it's Cheryl, it's $4.99 and then you you have to pay also for the payroll add on cost And if we had more than five users, blah blah blah blah. And then we have potentially up to $30,000 for two hundred hours of conversion time. What are we looking at as far as a total cost just to compare apples and apples for a QuickBooks financial system.
Certainly. How many users do you project would need to be on QuickBooks at one time. So if you, you could have seven eight people that potentially would need to have access to the QuickBooks program, but only five of them have the ability to be on the program unless you buy additional users. But even if you had seven and you have five, somebody has to be off in order for someone else to jump on.
Let's make this very simple. Laura, how many people are currently on Phoenix at any one time from the Board of Education? Yes,
well I don't think that's necessarily a fair question. Right now it's just me but we
Well all I want to know is how many, two, one?
Because I know at the town Maybe the better question is how many should be on it. Right now there's one. There's one. Okay. So at the town there's two.
So that's a maximum of three right now. I agree we probably need more, but that's another question and it's all at the same time. So even if we put let's say we put every department head on to the system, would they all need to be in there at the same time? So five users to me would be the number that I would sit there and say you would you would start with and if you need more, then you add on more. So if you wanted to do apples to apples, the other vendors gave us six.
Six users. Okay. So if we were gonna compare apples to apples, we need to add an extra user one. So that's an extra $299 for the additional user. Yes.
Okay. So the yearly cost is again for is it $4.99? Is that what said? Yes, sir. But that's for three years?
Yes. You don't have to upgrade the program again for three years.
And the $2.99 fee is also for three years? Yes, sir. Once you've purchased it, you've purchased it. Give or take you never pay it again. Only the only $100 a year plus support.
The only reason anyone will upgrade is for payroll purposes, and since we outsource our payroll, you don't you could go longer than three years. Michael might tell you to upgrade every three years. I might tell you you wanna upgrade every three years, but you do not need to upgrade if you're not doing payroll internally, and that's something as a town we can talk about because you could sit there and potentially do your payroll through QuickBooks and save the money that we're paying the payroll service that's outsourced at the school and outsourced at the town. That's a different question. Let's sit there and think about how we're combining our departments and what software we choose to use. So but there are a lot of things you could even think about down the road if you chose to sit there and save even additional money if you want.
You just want to remember too, though, that they may you pay that yearly fee of the $449 currently. That does give you unlimited backup and unlimited support. Currently, that's what it's listing. Now, could they change their mind in three years from now and say, okay, in order for you to continue with those benefits, it's now going to be a little bit more? Certainly, everyone raises their rates occasionally. The rates that I'm giving you currently are the rates that are as of the last two days as I was doing my final research. Could they raise some rates next next year? Certainly. Do I think that they would go to multiple thousands? That would not be my thought. I haven't seen any large increases in the QuickBooks programs ever.
So so, Cheryl, you based you said two hundred hours. That was your answer to Shannon. You said that was your worst case. My worst case. But have you have you done a conversion like this before in another town? I have. And was it what was your idea of hours that you spent there? Was it two hundred? It was only the town. The school did not convert.
Was only the town. The school did not convert. It took me about one hundred and thirty hours because I had to set up the due to do froms for the town. And then the town also wanted me to set up the Board of Education grants, because they wanted to be able provide a better grant structure for the auditors. So they had asked me to set that up. It was not the school was strictly the town and the grant portion. The school still administered all of their grants. I just would get a report from them on a monthly basis. After I did the conversion, they did retain me to stay on after that through the audit. And I would receive monthly reports
in order to make sure that the reports that the auditors were receiving were acceptable. Thank you very much. One thing I misconception Thank you very much.
One thing I misconception that I'd like to point out though is our commerce here are really, really busy. And I know Laura is going to speak to all of this in couple of minutes. But I would question the possibility of doing a major conversion over the summer. It's not a downtime for the school in any way. Sure, we don't have students here, but we are doing a tremendous amount of work during those really two months, essentially.
I'm sorry if you were addressing me. The mic continued to go in and out and in and out. So, I apologize I did not
did not if there was a question for me, I'm sorry. I was That unable to get was Superintendent Doyen. And she was basically saying that if we're trying to do conversion over the summer, that it's very difficult for the school staff to get it done at that point in time. Okay. But isn't that isn't that the point that we'd be paying her to do this?
So you would be doing if we hired you for that amount of money, you'd be doing the conversion. Correct? Yes, sir. So it doesn't matter if the school's busy.
No. And as a matter of fact, once the program is purchased. I'm sorry. Once the program is purchased, I have the program. It's easy enough if they're busy and or if the town is busy. Once I have the chart of accounts, how you would like it to look and the numbering system. I can do it direct from my, from my office. Back it up on thumb drives and or CDs. Once your computer system is up and running, deliver it to your system. Do a restore onto the server, and then just make sure that all of the users get set up.
Cheryl, what are your what are your ongoing costs? So I'm hearing you're doing the conversion. Are are we gonna continue to to pay for your fees to help with QuickBooks administration? Or is the understanding assumption whatever is that after we've purchased this that then it would be overtaken by the responsibilities of the new personnel in the finance department for Andover?
Yes, that was my assumption when I was contacted that I would prepare the chart of accounts, do the smaller funds, make sure that the balance sheet was set up, that the mapping was done, provide support while you're transitioning, and then potentially training someone there to make sure that they understood it. And then if you wanted periodic reviews, quarterly reviews or something of that nature, there's certainly going to be some training, reconciliations, pulling reports, memorizing reports, things of that nature, which would come with the training. But if you were potentially looking for assistance further on down the road, that would certainly be something that we we could discuss. I do have other do have other towns that do have me come in quarterly and review the books. So that that's certainly something that we are able to offer if the town wants it.
And as far as the towns that are using QuickBooks or not just your services, are you aware of approximately how many towns in Connecticut use QuickBooks to do their budgets? I am sorry. Are they financing?
I do not. I'm sorry. How many towns utilize your services for that purpose? Three. And what their budgets? Two of them are at fourteen. One of them are at six. Thanks. You're welcome.
Do you have any information related to the number of towns? I'm sorry?
I was asking one question. Yeah I don't I mean I do have several towns that use QuickBooks again on the town side. The Board of Education uses a separate system but I don't know the number of municipalities in the state that use QuickBooks.
Can I ask a question? Please. So you talked about the enterprise version versus online, that you prefer the enterprise version. Is that purely for functionality currently? Because a lot of organizations and I don't think QuickBooks is any different, is investing more money on their software as a service type of applications, which means you may see newer features in the online version long term.
Online has a monthly fee. Any number of users if you're using online, but your budget to actual reports, a budget overview, your being able to have multiple screens, getting a drill down, you can still get the drill down, but it's a little bit more difficult. Enterprise is more set up in my opinion for large businesses with inventory. It also has another yearly fee. I believe enterprise may I think it may be 10 seats. But it is a more expensive program. It allows for greater transactions. I don't have any town that's using enterprise at all. I don't have any towns that are using online. All of them are using the desktop model.
I think Chris was actually asking, is there a reason that they're not using the online? Right. Correct.
Chris I apologize. This is Jeff Maguire. The online version is much more clunky than the desktop version.
Yes. Agree with that currently. Have a little bit of background experience with QuickBooks as well. But what we're seeing in the software industry is most organizations are investing money in that software as a service or online service. So you would expect over the next three years, they'll probably become more parallel. And eventually, software as a service will likely eclipse the on prem version was my only question. And
if we chose to, Chris, we could move to the online version at any time. Yes, you could.
You could upgrade to any other version if you all of a sudden decided you wanted to go to enterprise and you currently have pro. Let's say you went with the three seat versus the five seat. You can always upgrade to enterprise or any of the other versions of QuickBooks. You also can automatically import it to online. They only have a tool for that. The only reason that anyone,
any business, for the most part, would go to Enterprise would be inventory and the sheer volume of transactions. So if you have, you know, QuickBooks does have a limitation on number of transactions, but for the town and for the Board of Education, in my mind, we might have 400 checks between the two entities that we process on a monthly basis, maybe 400 checks. I'm going on the high side. Right. So there is absolutely zero reason to go to enterprise because you have no reason
I think it's more program than you need. The other nice thing about QuickBooks is they have a collapse feature. So after several years of QuickBooks, let's say, you have three years on there, you can collapse a previous year, and then what it does is it takes a backup file of all the detailed transactions puts it on your server, or wherever you choose to leave it. And then it condenses all of those transactions to a one line item transaction, thereby freeing up some of your space to be able to enter additional transactions. That's available to you also.
But you could also keep a separate file for every specific year and just leave it sit there because you have a backup for every year. So you'll never lose the detailed transactions if you chose to. That would be correct. Anyway,
this I have I have a couple questions, Cheryl. Go ahead. When you say number of transactions, is a transaction more than just cutting a check
when you're counting number of transactions? Yes, it would be entering in an invoice, entering in a PO, entering in a bill, entering in a journal entry, things that are counted as transactions. Okay, so like in a
journal entry where you have multiple lines, is the journal entry itself one transaction or is each line of transaction? One transaction. And then the other thing you talked about was setting up the different funds as companies. Yes. Did I understand that right? Okay. So if you had your different funds set up as a company, do those companies talk to each other? Can you have one checkbook for the three different companies? How does that work? Well, if your
grants do your grants run through the general fund checking? No. No. The grants have their own separate checking account?
They currently do. Okay. So are all And of you have to remember I'm speaking from the school side, we're also looking at this to be all encompassing. So if we had a company that is grants and a company that is general government, and we run it all out of one checking account, can that work in QuickBooks or do you have to physically have separate companies?
No, you can make it all work, but I would caution not having the grants as a separate company because of reporting requirements on your 100 eleven's and your 140 one's. So, I mean, although remember that you still have the requirements to report to the state of Connecticut when you've done a pull down, you can put your budget so if you want in to a title, or one of your grants, let's say title six, and you have your specific budget, you would want that into QuickBooks. Because if it's a two year grant and you've pulled some half of the money, you have half of the money coming over the next year as a separate company, the grants and QuickBooks, you can set the reports to show this is how much I have, this is how much I pulled down, this is how much I have the next year. Same with Capital Non reoccurring, your student activities, they have their own account, they can have their own separate QuickBooks file. Or if you have your smaller funds that have no checking account, but they are reported separately within the financial statements, I would recommend doing a separate QuickBooks file.
So, you say separate QuickBooks file, that's a separate company? Yes.
So, is there with all these separate companies, is there any way for the town to see where they are as a whole financially? Or would they have to look at this company, this company, this company to see where they are? So is it three different balance sheets? Is it Potentially but the smaller funds If
I can just add because we've had discussions about this before. You know really you can you can account for everything within one QuickBook file and use that class tracking in order to differentiate between the grants in your general operating budget. So sometimes using the the separate companies makes it a little bit cleaner but you certainly can use that class tracking account codes in the one QuickBook files to separate out your grant transactions from your general operating budget transactions. And then when you're doing your reports you would customize your reports to pull whatever information that you would need whether it's your general budget or for grants. Thank you. Cheryl, is that an
option? Yes, that would be correct. The report will be large though. It'll be a large report. Laura, is that similar to what you're doing now? Well,
I struggle with those questions of what I'm doing now versus where you wanna be. Cause again, you're looking at combining a finance department. So are you looking to, to keep what we're doing as is, or are you looking to make this more holistic? So, is that what I'm doing now? I, we have funds. I don't have separate companies. If I wanted to see on the board of ed level where I am in totality between all the funds, I can do that. I can run a report for all funds. I don't believe the town uses, I believe the town on Phoenix right now is only using one fund. I'm currently using three.
I think I think what am I am I missing this though, Cheryl, from what you were saying though, you're saying companies, but for the sake of you're using a terminology, really you're just setting up the fund as a company. Is that correct? No. She's setting up she's setting up silos when she's setting up companies.
So they're basically the same as what you're doing currently?
No. No. I would have to set up a totally separate fund. So you would have the general fund. You would have the board of education fund. You would have a grants activity fund. You would and those all would be potentially separate QuickBooks files within the server or as Mike had stated, we could set all the smaller funds up as one fund with a class structure, meaning you have revenue in, you have expenditures out, you just really want to keep track of that specific fund. You could do the same thing. You could still have a town QuickBooks file and a Board of Education QuickBooks file and have the fund, the grants within the Board of Education's QuickBooks file allocated by class. Basically Laura's silos is within the fund. Yes.
Okay. But I can have an unlimited number of classes if I chose. Yes.
Laura, do you I mean, listen, before so before we let Cheryl go if the Board of Education has more questions please ask.
I think there would be more questions there hasn't been time to digest the information. Okay. I
would be more than happy to at another time if you so choose and you have additional questions. I'm more than happy to participate in another one of your meetings if you'd like and answer anything that I can. Okay.
Cheryl, thank you. You're welcome. I will sign off if that's acceptable or would you like me to stick around?
Anyone have any more questions Cheryl, anybody? No problem, Cheryl leave? No, I think hers was specific.
We may want Michael to stick around or come back on when we do the office questions.
Okay. Cheryl, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you, Cheryl. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You. You.
Right. So on our on the next point of our agenda was the, combined financial department. No. The next part of the agenda is for Laura to talk about the two other You're right, Shannon. Thank you. Okay. Laura, I misread your 100% No worries. 3B, presentation by Laura Edwards and software committee on BMSI and Hibbens.
So what I thought I would start doing is talk about the current software that we have, which is Phoenix, and how it works for the town and the school. And when I go through this, I am asking Barbara if I am misstating something on the town side to please jump in and correct me. So currently, the town and the school use a software program called Phoenix. So we are on the same software, but we do databases. So, town has its own database and the school has its own database. The, we also have different account structures. So, right now, when Cheryl was talking, she said QuickBooks is limited to seven characters. Right now, the town is currently using 12 and the board of ed is currently using 15. Barbara did start working on looking at what would need to be in compliance with COLA, and they use up to 26. How each entity uses the software, the town, as my understanding is, only uses it for its general fund only. And there are 10 different departments. And then within those departments, there's more departments.
Laura, can you pause for a second? Can Amanda mute everyone except for Laura because there's way too much background? We're getting echoes. Will do. Please. Thank you. Just want to be able to hear you. Okay. Do I need to start over? Nope. No. Before you got into minutia.
So the town currently uses it for their general fund only. There are about 10 different departments in the town. And within those departments, there's sub departments. For instance, there's a general government, there's public works, public safety, sanitation, building, and the list goes on. The funds that are not in the Phoenix on the town side are the capital reserve fund, and there's nine different funds in that. And the non major government funds, and there's 36 within that. Fiduciary funds have three. The transactions that the town is using Phoenix for, I believe all its revenues are recorded with a journal entry. Payroll is recorded with a journal entry and your expenses are recorded through accounts payable. The school Revenue is through revenue, not journal entry. Okay. The revenue in Phoenix, yeah. Just payroll and journal entries are journal entries.
So when you record tax revenue you're doing that not as a journal entry?
Tax revenue is a journal entry but other revenue town revenue is through the revenue function.
Thank you. School uses it for our general fund and we have 28 departments. We also use it for our grant fund, we're running 12 different grants through that, and we use it for our food service fund. The funds that we are not using Phoenix for is our student activities, which is on QuickBooks. The transactional features that we use is our revenue. We do use the accounts receivable system in Phoenix, and we use that for pre k and retiree insurance. Grant revenue, we use the receipt module, similar to what Barbara is using on non tax revenue. And other revenues, small revenues, we use a journal entry. Our payroll is also recorded with a journal entry. And we do use the purchase order system in conjunction with the accounts payable system for recording our expenses. So that's kind of where we're at currently. The challenges with the current software that we have, one is it will not be supported anymore after the end of June. So the need for us to look at a different system. The other challenge with Phoenix is it treats each fiscal year as a separate database. So it doesn't carry forward normal balance sheet items like your cash. Bank reconciliations are a tremendous challenge in Phoenix, and exporting to Excel can be clunky. Phoenix was bought out by Power School, and once Power PowerSchool took ownership, they decided they weren't going to support it anymore.
They have offered an alternative, which I'll get to later. January 2019, we were notified that Phoenix would not support after June of this year. At that time, Joe Higgins did a little poking around to see what was out there. I attended some of my CASBO, which is an organization of school business officials, to see what other boards of eds were looking to do. I also was able to find out LEARN, which is a consortium similar to EASCOM, was looking to do a region wide RFP. RAM also was on Phoenix. They went out and did an RFP, but theirs was way more extensive. They were doing what's called an enterprise resource planning system, which would take all the different systems that a school currently uses and try to roll that up for efficiency and better information. So what they were going out to do would not be useful for what we're trying to do. With all that said, we thought it was in the best interest of both the town and the school to work on this jointly.
And so a task force committee was formed to do just that. I was asked to chair that, which I have. The committee is made up of Jeff McGuire, Adrian Mandeville, Mark Brinker, and Barbara Griffin. One of the first things we did was to determine what our core requirements and the functions we wanted of the system. I had used the learn RFP as kind of a baseline to do that. We spent some time going over that and rating what we wanted. And that's one of the things I had sent to you. It's called the summary of priorities. And it listed the things that we thought we would be must haves for an accounting system. I can certainly run through that if there's something you don't understand on it, or if you want to ask me about it. But a couple things listening to Cheryl's presentation, and again, without doing a deep dive that were missing was I think the do to, do froms are important. They are a messy journal entry if you have to do them manually. Personally, I support being able to have the different funds. Seeing the budgeting, the iterations of how the budget changes from when it's first presented, and then the changes that happen until you get to the final that seem to be missing on the QuickBooks side. I have a bunch of questions for on the purchase orders. But anyway, you can take a look. We did spend a lot of time on coming up with those priorities.
We also created a list which you were also sent what we were looking for in a vendor. Some of the things I, you know, could be more questions asked to Cheryl, but expertise and support were one of the items. You know, can you pick up the phone and ask? Can you run ideas? Get, you know, pick their brains on some of the challenges or situations that you may come across. One of the things we did was we did look at what other towns and boards of Ed were using. So CCM did provide us a list. It was based on a survey asked, I'd only have what people responded to. There was 19 responses, and there's certainly many more towns in CCM than 19, but of that list, three use QuickBooks. On the Board of Ed side, there was 91 responses, and two, use QuickBooks. So, took those lists as kind of a place to start to call, just cold call some of these vendors and see if they would be interested in just giving us a ballpark number of what it would cost to convert and purchase their system. And based on that, two of them got eliminated right away because they were just out of reach. And then the two that we did settle on was BMSI and Edmunds. QuickBooks is not a company per se that you call and ask those kinds of questions to. It's a box you buy off the shelf.
There are people like Cheryl out there, and at the time, we just didn't have that information to include them.
Laura, we appreciate you wanting to give this presentation right now, but you're on the agenda to give a presentation for BMSI and Edmonds. So if you wanted to do that, that'd be appropriate, but I believe our intention was to still let the committee make the decision. We were just having Cheryl give her presentation because she was available and that sort of saved us the
Well then if that's that's what your goal was then I would suggest that we have BMSI and the Edmonds come in and present the same way Cheryl did. Because I I don't feel I have their I don't think I could do them fair representation as to do that.
I understand that but you this wasn't the presentation wasn't necessarily for just the committee. In this case it was the the board of board of selectmen had not heard any feedback because we're also using it on the town side. So that was really part of it. Then we've already kind of made the decision to go to QuickBooks on the town side. It was edification for the board of education to try to give some transparency on that as to why we're going there but the committee will still make this decision and then we'll come back to the appropriate boards. So you
as someone that sat on the committee, I guess I'm at a loss as to why we had the task force committee if without running QuickBooks through it, you've already made that decision. Four people on the town were on this committee. For town side? Well, the task force was me from the Board of Ed's side, four people from the town side. And the task force did not make any decision on QuickBooks.
The board of selectmen has made a decision on QuickBooks. So
they've done that without Laura. Involving the task force. Yes. Okay. Then I have nothing to present then.
You're you're currently on the agenda to do the presentation for b BMSI and Edmonds. If you don't want so you don't wanna do that? I don't feel comfortable in doing that. Okay. Well
so now I'd I'd I'm at a loss of what's going on. Has the board of selectmen made a voted on and approved of the purchase of QuickBooks as the financial software for the town?
For the for the town side, that is our that that's where we're going. Yes. But for the school, that we were we're still kinda leaving it up to the committee for school. Sorry Shannon,
I'll have to interrupt David. We voted on nothing to sit there and move. Our our desire and where the board of selectmen will go is the board of selectmen is leaning toward QuickBooks, Right? We are leaning toward QuickBooks. So the question was, what can we do? I mean, how can we make this work together? Because the whole reason to even have this meeting is to sit there and have transparency between the two groups. I I will tell you, if the Board of Education went to BMSI or one or the other, Adrian's right, we would sit there and move the town to QuickBooks to make our operations easier. We believe that we can make QuickBooks work for the Board of Education and that's what we're trying to understand.
So that's what I'm trying to understand because of the town I mean, the whole purpose of this is to have everything functioning together, especially if we're gonna go to one finance department. We can't have two different softwares
running for for the town and the school. Correct. A 100% and that's what we would like to get to but as you know, we need buy in from all of the boards, from both boards to make this work because if you chose to sit there and go in a different direction, you could. That wouldn't be wise from our standpoint. It wouldn't be wise for us. And if we need to go to BMSI to make this work, we will sit there and talk about it. But our inclination, my inclination from dealing with these companies and dealing with, you know, what you're trying to do from a software perspective, Laura is correct. You know, Laura is 100% right. Phoenix has two different files right now. To get us to combine to do the TOM financial statements, we have to take the data and create an Excel breakdown to make this work. We have right now, the Board of Education's checks get processed out of the operating account that's controlled by the town. The town, for the lack of better terms, doesn't and Michael's on there, we don't do a good job reconciling our bank accounts because they're not all implemented into the same software. So there's a lot of things that we can do better. And, you know, when I sit there and say we have 400 transactions, I don't mean all of the individual transaction Laura's beads, I mean checks that actually go through the operating account. So there will never be a perfect software. I don't care which software you try to take, there will never be a perfect financial software. We have to make accommodations. We have to make it work, but we're a small enough entity.
You know, between the two groups, we have a $6,000,000 $7,000,000 budget maximum. I mean, not that big. And if we sit there and look at it from a software perspective, I can only tell you from my background, I would tell you QuickBooks we can make QuickBooks work if we all buy in. If we all don't buy in, whatever software you use is going to be difficult to deal So And and that's that's So from what I'm
is just we're having this joint meeting, it's important that for quote unquote buy in, that the person who's been in charge of the school's finances for the last many years needs to quote unquote buy in to and so I would like to hear from Laura because either we're gonna have a recommendation that's made by the task force that was created or it sounds like the town is already leaning towards purchasing QuickBooks that the Board of Education, and by virtue of this meeting, it would make sense to do it with all of us here, needs to hear from Laura as to her feelings about BMSI and Edmunds as opposed to QuickBooks, if that's okay. That's what we wanted. Yeah. Is that okay, Laura? Can you, can you give us a sense of that, please? Well, yes.
And this is not well thought out of, it's off, off the cuff. I, working through the task force, which is what I thought its mission was, was to get buy in from all of us on this, We did go through, I personally went through an evaluation process and I submitted that to the task force and I also submitted it to the boards where I summarized the two demonstrations and what I felt about them. I felt Edmonds was a stronger company. And I also did the reference checks on both companies. VMSI came back mediocre at best from the people I talked to,
and Edmondson was clearly, the recommendations were much more in their favor. Was one person I spoke to actually was a BMSI person that switched over to Edmonds. When I listened to Cheryl talk, and again, without getting into the same kind of weeds that we went through with Edmondson and BMSI, I hear a lot of work arounds and that concerns me. It concerns me when you're trying to take a three person function right now and bring that down to one and a half and have to deal with workarounds. If you're going to make this work with reduced staff, there really needs to be efficiencies and it needs to be clean. So that concerns me. As far as the job market pool and QuickBooks, most people that use QuickBooks are, in my experience, small businesses. I think if you're trying to hire somebody with a municipal background, they are going to be used to a system like a BMSI or an Edmunds or a Muni or a Tyler.
That's what municipal accountants work with. They don't, as the survey says, they don't work with QuickBooks. Can you make it work? Yeah, you can make it work. You can make anything work. But it's just, you know, the time and effort, not only in getting it set up, but just, you know, the workarounds concern me. The seven digit limitation concerns me. I know she looked at a financial statement that was based off of objects, but we, my board looks at both objects and departments. And that seemed to be weak on the QuickBooks side. Drilling down to transactions, you can do that QuickBooks, you can do it on Edmondson, you can do it on BMSI. And I just felt more confidence with the other two company as far as their breadth of staff, their knowledge, the ability to pick up a phone and get help right away, able to understand the language you're speaking. So that's, I would lean away from QuickBooks at this point in time. I would need a better sales pitch than what I got today.
So you would move away from QuickBooks to Edmunds because more you have people that you would bring in that would relate to that software better? Is that the main issue? Because I will tell you that QuickBooks is used by many, many companies.
I don't disagree with that, but this is not a company. This is fund accounting, which is very different than running a hairdressing salon or a shoeshine factory. This municipal accounting has your different funds. It has a lot of state reporting.
All of that can be put into the system. And then I would ask the auditor if it all can be put into the system. Well, again, I didn't
today. And I got that demonstration from Edmonds and BMSI. So you're asking me to give my opinion on something that I've seen and the committee has seen. We have not seen how QuickBooks would actually work for us. Okay.
And what is the just getting back to my question, Laura, what is the cost of an Edmunds or a BMSI?
Bear with me. So a BMSI, and again, are preliminary numbers. The one time cost, which includes the consultation, the data extraction, migration, testing, training, is about $9,000 And then their annual renewal was $10,000 The Edmonson, the upfront cost to do the conversion setup training was $28,000 and their annual renewal was 4,400
Okay, so we know the municipal softwares will be more expensive. The question is, what is our end product out of those softwares compared to QuickBooks or compared to any of them?
Correct, and I don't feel today gave us that information. Okay.
Can I just interrupt real quick and ask a question? Sure.
So if we had all these, if there were concerns about QuickBooks, why did we not keep her on and ask her these questions and voice these concerns so we could have a response tonight?
We asked if everyone had any questions at that point in time. We let her go.
I think part of the problem I guess my question is directed towards Laura then. If we had these questions, why would she not kept on? I mean I feel like we're going in circles here. So Dan, when we had the other vendors come
in, they came in, they spent two hours with us, they ran through, you actually got to see data being entered into the system, how the reports were generated, what the reports would look like, how you could drill down. We didn't have a demonstration tonight that we had with the other two vendors. To me it's just not it's not even apples to apples.
So then so then what you're recommending, Laura, is that we have the we have even if we bring Cheryl back in, we have Cheryl come back in and do a demonstration for the committee so they can see how the drill downs would work? Correct.
You know, how am I gonna get the reports I need that my board is looking at and that the state of Connecticut is looking at? Well, was gonna be my question because I think one of the main things if you're gonna do a municipal,
geared software is you're gonna have software that's geared towards providing the information that's required from the board of education and the school to the state, which it seemed like there would be a workaround or whatnot from QuickBooks, but just how onerous is that? Yeah, they're not workarounds.
They're setting up reports one time and then you can sit there and recreate the reports time after time after time. Mean, so that's what somebody needs to come in and prove and show, that should be workable.
Shannon, and Laura, maybe you can help me out here too, but, outside of the EFS reporting, is there additional reporting that the district provides from a state financial perspective?
There's, there's a lot of different reporting beside you're talking about the ED001, right? Yeah. The EFS, the, yep, education financial system. Okay. Sorry. I still use the old term. Yep. I don't know what's required on the town side. I know Barbara was looking to get towards CAFR standards. But there's also, shoot, I just did it. The MOE for special ed, which is complex. That's for our IDEA grant. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. Yeah, so I think from a report
Phoenix had the mapping in it for the ESS. So it's not something I have to recreate. It's there when I set up an account, can give it the map right then and there.
Okay. Yeah, think the UCOA, to me, I wouldn't necessarily base my decision on, you know, the reporting to the state because ultimately you know the state again municipalities a workaround with the mapping tool that they utilize. So generally speaking once you map your accounts and again your accounts are already mapped so whatever system you go to you're gonna map it to the new account in the new system and that's going to have the same EFS code that you're using now. So you know I think that's probably a one time exercise again unless you're adding multiple accounts a year.
But again it's something that the town has to do as well and I think that's
That's for every software right Michael? No matter what software we pick we have to do something.
Well yes, you will. Think whatever software you pick you still have to map for EFS purposes. Although it's a little bit easier if you're using the actual ECOA accounts. But again I think for the Board of Ed I think you have around 200 accounts that ultimately get mapped. So again it's not a significant volume of accounts. It's actually double that.
But it's a one time deal? It is a one time deal. Okay. I think the problem here is that there are two things that happen is one COVID happened because we were actually planning on going down to a town to have a demo done. And unfortunately everything kinda just hit the fan and we weren't able to schedule that in. So that was part of the problem. And then the second part is that QuickBooks doesn't because of the cost factor, they don't have some fancy guys that come in a suit and come to your office and sell you on it. It's people go and find them. And I think Laura is looking at this like it's somebody running hair salon on the corner when
as Jeff is trying to point out, there are multiple large corporations that do this. And certainly as we've heard towns with budgets way bigger than ours that are doing this. So it's not the hair salon on the corner. I think that's an unfair statement, Laura. Well
just to go past that part of it, ability for you know a certified public accounting firm like Michaels that you know not only do they know municipal accounting they also know QuickBooks. I mean, I'll hazard a guess that a significant number of their business clients and some of their municipalities use QuickBooks right now. So their staff is well versed in QuickBooks. I bet you, Michael, I'd dare ask you, is your staff better versed in QuickBooks or some of the municipal accounting software?
Yeah, mean generally speaking, you know, a lot of our clients, again, medium to small sized businesses as as well as smaller governments again are using quickbooks. You know that being said you know I'm here kind of as your independent auditor to more or less you know answer questions if you have concerns about a particular system or not. So I don't want to sit there and make the you know the recommendation to say hey you know hands down you got to go QuickBooks. I just want to kind of be there and address you know whether or not there truly are issues associated with using the specific software. Okay, understood.
Candidly then, do you foresee any issues with us on QuickBooks meeting the state reporting requirements?
No. Thank you. I join in here real quick? It sounds to me that the committee has already listed out a set of priorities is what I heard from Laura. And the committee evaluated the two pieces of software. They have not done that with QuickBooks. Shouldn't we have them do that with QuickBooks? So we have an apples to apples comparison across all three that we can all look at and say, yep, QuickBooks will do it or no QuickBooks won't. Let's do it. I disagree.
Yeah, that's what we're saying. It's gotta go back to the committee. The point of doing this was because given COVID and everything else trying to schedule yet another meeting to get as many people into this as possible.
Okay. So then let's sit there and just get the committee on an online meeting with with Cheryl and what we'll ask from Cheryl. If possible, we'd like to sit there and get, maybe she can ask one of her municipalities if she can sit there and use them as a test case or something to show us, to show us how you get around in the software and be able to print reports and look up reports and how you memorize all the reports. Because the question for all of us as members is how easy is the access to the financial information, and how does it work for Laura and for Eric and for Barbara to sit there and get information easily accessible to members that need to make decisions? Because I can tell you, being on the Board of Selectmen for five plus years, I've never had easy access to information related to the town and to the use of the Phoenix system. It's extremely difficult to get and extremely you can't make heads or tails of the information sometimes when you get it in the at the detail level. Not at a high level like you know they can it can be printed out a report but when I've asked questions where I want to know what's in an account and I want to know what transactions hit a given account it's not that simple to get. So this would be about simplicity and improving efficiencies between everything. And Laura is correct, if we are looking to make a combined department, and we want to sit there and reduce
the overall number of staff, we better have an efficient accounting system and software that can sit there and manage the number of transactions we as a community do have. So I have no problem. I think we go back to Cheryl and we say, give a presentation to the software committee so you have apples to apples comparisons and we can all make a financial decision based upon performance and dollars. Right? Is that acceptable to everybody here?
That is but so if that committee does not recommend QuickBooks are you going to go with the committee's recommendation or do you already have has this Board of Selectmen has already said they want QuickBooks? I mean, I'm kind of questioning what function the committee still has.
Well, listen, you know, we can't sit there, I can't sit there and tell you that I will if you sat there and said, Laura, you wanted to go with Edmonds, I can't sit there and tell you that I'm going to be, on my board and say, Yes, I agree to go with the town to that. Because really, Laura, I sit there and I look at what we've done in the last five years. If I hadn't, you know and I know Barbara says she reconciles now, I hope it works, but, you know, I haven't really I've never felt comfortable at all related to that software, and I wonder if I would feel comfortable with, you know, Edmunds, if it can be run jointly. I'll ask you one question about Edmonds so I understand. Would we have to have two databases for the town and for the Board of Ed?
You do not have to have two databases with either of them, although they tend to recommend it. Okay, so they're recommending splitting
our community, our financial department into two separate databases. So I have to get into one file in Edmonds for the Board of Ed and I have to get into another file for the town.
And so how am I going to get all my combined transactions? So the reason they were recommending that was to avoid having to have Right now, again, our chart of accounts are very different in the way they're set up. So for us to go onto one system, no matter whether it's QuickBooks, Edmunds, or BMSI, we're going to have to have a chart of accounts that has the same number of digits and those digits function similarly. So, you know, this segment represents department, this segment represents something else in this segment. So we have to agree on the segments and the length of the segments for us to all be under one system. Okay.
That has to happen no matter what system you go with. No, without doubt, without our system. But we could make it work with seven digits or we can make it work with 22 digits. I mean, we can make it work. That's not an issue. But if you have one separate file for the Board of Ed and one separate file for the town, that means that somehow I've got to get back and I've got to reconcile my bank account because all of the transactions that come out of the Board of Education go into the town general fund and They Edmonds said that they would probably be able to figure out how to make it work on one. They also need to do a workaround.
They would do the workaround, not us. Okay. They would do the workaround, not us. And the reason they were, again, go back, the reason they were recommending two different databases was because of the different chart of accounts. If we are all under the same chart of accounts configuration, then there's no need to have two different databases.
Okay. So So we have a workaround there. Yeah. But
But the workaround is the something workaround I'm trying to avoid is workarounds that staff has to workaround. If the accounting software can do the workaround inside the software and staff doesn't have to do that on a monthly basis or whatever, then you have saved some time and efficiency on your personnel's use of their time. Totally agree.
100%. So I would sit there your question to me was, will I sit there and, you know, I am a believer and I will tell both boards, I'm a believer that QuickBooks can be managed and can be maintained and can sit there and provide us a significant level of efficiency. I'm a believer in that. Now, I'm not the only one vote on the board. I believe that. I believe that it would be better for the town, it will be better for both organizations, and every one of us as a board member will get more efficient information, which is I think what every one of us desires. We wanna know granular information as to what's going on in a given specific account because we have concerns about where our money is going and how it's working. Eric would get tremendous amount of additional information. It wouldn't it will be easier. I'm not saying we're perfect, don't kid me. Not perfect but easier.
So I, you know, my response to anything that is anything we go with is going to be better than what we have. Are 100%. So,
you know, so you you like QuickBooks. I'm not a big fan, but you know what? No matter which road we go down, you are going to get the information you are asking for. Yes, and that so that's the issue. So but again, I'm only one voter. I'm only one vote out of five on the board of
selectmen. I mean, told you what my opinion is, but I do I will I will go back to your board and I would sit there and say, if you if your board needs if your committee needs to sit there and have Cheryl come in and present as an expert on QuickBooks, then let's get it done and so we can move forward. Because, you know, Cheryl's not on the phone right now. I don't believe, you know, just from my standpoint, I don't believe the setup of this, you know, is going to take that many hours. I think that if we do certain things that we can sit there and minimize the amount of time that she's looking at putting in. What I would use her for is I would use her for the very high end, what type of reports do I need to build? How do I need to get data out? How do I need to look at my budget? How do I need to look at different things? Because
some of the Yeah, know, that's all part of the whole transition plan and looking at what your current staff is able to contribute to that process and what it's not. What it's not. And so And that's, go ahead. So
does this go back, Cheryl's presentation go back to the committee, which you are part of? Yeah, that's great. Does it go back to the committee to do a demonstration and then the committee is coming back to the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Ed? Yes, let's do it. Okay, so the committee,
which was Eric, myself, and Barbara, were the three of us that saw the demos themselves. I have submitted my observations on those, so we need one from Barbara and Eric also. And then we also need to all, at least the same three of us, see what QuickBooks has to offer. I think the whole committee needs to
weigh in on this. This isn't just the three of you. No, I understand that. But the whole committee was asked to come see the demonstration and those three people showed up to see those two demonstrations. And the whole committee can come and see QuickBooks but understand that you didn't, you, Adrian, didn't sit through the other two either. Unfortunately, have a day job, I was not able to make I'm not finding fault. I'm just saying to be able to make a fair comparison at a minimum, the same three people that saw the first two should see the QuickBooks. Yes. Okay. That's fine. Let's get it scheduled
and move forward. Yeah. No, I was going to say I have a question. So just so that things keep moving, can we just get an idea of the rest of us of so the next step is going to be you guys are going to get the presentation, and then we're going to schedule another meeting with both boards again. Do we want to put like a timeline together just so that another month or two doesn't go away? Well, this was this was the
is what my ask was after evaluating the two systems is where does that task force committee go next? Well we were supposed to go
to the QuickBooks presentation that didn't end up happening because of all the towns got shut down. That was the next step. That that didn't that didn't happen. Well,
in in fairness QuickBooks was never on the list either.
Wasn't on your list, but it wasn't on the committee's list. It wasn't on the committee's list either.
Okay. Well, in in fairness, I Eric, if I remember, weren't you setting we were trying to set that up with was it Salem or something or Sprague? You're on mute. Unmute yourself.
Yeah, we did planned on going down and talking to the finance director of Salem who their town uses QuickBooks and we did have that set up but again you know they made a decision to shut their office as did all of we and that kind of died on the vine until we you know until Michael kind of lined us up with Cheryl. So it was on the list.
Listen, that's not even a question like what It is a question. It's been brought up. Listen, QuickBooks QuickBooks has been on my list since I sat there and inputted all of the transactions for the town in 2016 and reconciled the entire bank accounts. It's it's always been the way we could go. I could never sit there and get the last board to sit there and and listen. So to me Well, it wasn't it wasn't
presented to the task force is what I'm saying. And you were a part of that task force and QuickBooks was not on the radar because of the low number of municipalities that use it. Again, I I know I was boring you to tears, but I went through the process to say these are how these two comp we came down to these two companies. But but should Laura, as I pointed out to you in meetings
on that committee before we started going out and doing demos that we would try to get towns that had it and get information, and we did get that information. We were going to Sprague trying to set that up so we could come back to the committee and have a presentation. And as I pointed out to you previously, a lot of towns don't use lot of municipalities, if you say there's a 169 towns and you have five or six or 10 or whatever it is using QuickBooks, a lot of more towns don't use it because they're having other functions that they need. I. E. They provide services that we do not. They may have water or sewer or gas that they're also using larger software systems that can handle that and have add on functions. If you go by just what the number one software program out there most of them are owned by Tyler. We didn't look at really any of those. We did.
Tyler and there was one other one. There was four and we eliminated two because of cost and Tyler was one of them. Right, and we eliminated them right away. But QuickBooks was still on the radar. Difference as we spoke
is that QuickBooks does not have a Salesforce that comes in and does demo. So we needed to find a account that we could go to.
So And Okay. By the way, Sprague when I looked at Sprague in 2016 or whatever in '17 they actually use QuickBooks and they actually use QuickBooks to do they have a water and sewer department and I believe they use QuickBooks to do their billing for that just as a sign of Anyway, it doesn't matter. We have to move on. I mean, we have we have to we have to bring it back to the committee, let the committee see it, and then come back. And Paula, the question was, what's next steps? Whether we have a meeting here or the committee makes its recommendations and then we go to the next Board of Selectment meeting and we vote on it, that would be the issue.
Those would Yeah. Be And I'm just I'm thinking that's great we've got next steps but some sort of timeline again because we'll be two months into this and,
you know Well, we'll sit there and see whether the committee can sit there and have an online meeting and have an online presentation that works. Yeah, I would think they could do the presentation
for QuickBooks and then make a decision at that meeting. And that way it can come back to the board of selectmen for the next meeting and go from there.
Well, you gotta make sure that everybody's present that meeting, right? You wanna make sure everybody's there? Yeah, absolutely.
Hey, Jeff, this is Jeff Murray. I just have a quick question. Mean, I've heard from Laura. I've heard from Adrian. I've heard from I've heard from you. The other two members of the committee, Eric and Barbara, what are their recommendations and what do they feel because we really haven't heard any input from them on the committee. But I was just curious what they have, what are their thoughts? I'll let them first. You want me to go first? Sure. Okay, well, hold on just a moment. And be honest. Okay.
I've been listening to the discussion very, very intently and do appreciate the points being made about QuickBooks and I appreciate the points about accounting software. I just have only used accounting software, and, I have used this is, the third accounting software program I've used. I find them extremely easy. And and it may be just because I really like municipal accounting, and I really understand municipal accounting. So a software program that is geared toward municipal accounting is very, very easy for me to use. And I used Phoenix in a previous job. And I learned it in about a week. And when I started working in Andover, Andoverhead Phoenix, I hadn't used it for ten years, but I was probably up and running within days. And so that's the only program I've used to program I know. I like accounting, I would use whatever, you know, the town was using, but I find accounting software easy. And I don't have any problems with Phoenix, I wouldn't have any problem continuing to use Phoenix. I have a contract with the town that only goes through December. So I don't even really want to weigh in too heavily because I may be helping with setup, but I'm not going to be using it. So that's my input. Okay, I just wanted your opinion for the record.
Thank you.
Sure, from my perspective I sat through and so I'm looking at things differently than both Laura and Barbara and I'm not looking at it from the perspective of somebody that's entering transactions and deals with the day to day nuts and bolts of it. I'm looking at it from somebody who's trying to understand where we are in the big picture and have the ability to monitor what's going on in the finance department and be able to independently pull whatever I need out of the system. I got my personal opinion was that of the two we looked at heavily, Edmunds in terms of the ease of my getting information back from the system and being able to oversee
was definitely a better approach than BMSI. I felt that you know the the demonstration of what I would have to do to get the reports out of it that I wanted was really good with Edmunds. Now, I don't have the same level of familiarity with QuickBooks. The good thing from my perspective with QuickBooks is, I mean, it's frankly the only accounting software that I personally have ever used. I haven't used it in a long time. I, had QuickBooks when I ran my own business. The accountant I worked with set it all up for me and I spent three or four days in training and I was able to do the minimal parts I need. I would need somebody to teach me enough about that software package to get the information out I wanted, but I would need to do that with any of the software packages. So from an administration standpoint and a budgeting standpoint, I thought Edmonds had some really powerful features that I would like, but I don't know if it's know, the real question is, is the additional cost worth the additional, you know, is it worth it to pay for the additional, you know, to get a municipal specific software
rather than take QuickBooks and just adapt it for our use. And I'll deal with whatever you give me. Let me put it that way. That answer your question? Yeah, thanks Eric. Yep.
There any Shannon, other you're talking, but you're muted. There you go. Thank you.
I think the only other thing as far as cost is is what Laura said, which is the the personnel's time, who's gonna be dealing with this. So if it's really QuickBooks and it's easy and it can be set up once with the 400 accounts for Ann Arbor Elementary School and the reporting to the state can be done, obviously, that's great. And QuickBooks is exponentially cheaper, than either of the other two, softwares that that we've had explained to us. But I think that's why you established a task force. That's why you established a committee to look at, from the people who are gonna be using the software. I I so I think we need to go back to the committee. I don't know that we need to belabor this much more this evening, because it's real important to me that we get on to dealing with the finance department. And we have a committee that's supposed to be looking at it that's already looked at the two other demonstrations. So let them have the QuickBooks demonstration and
come back with their recommendations please.
Okay. I agree with you Shannon. So are there any other discussions any of the board members wants to have related to anything on item three in the agenda?
The cost for those three, Edmonds is 32.4, the MSI is 18 and QuickBooks could be up to $31,000
Well, QuickBooks is up to $31,000 if we pay If she uses the $200 right? Well, and then but really the issue is it's the next year and the year after and the year after and the year after. There's some other information. All right, any other questions?
Yeah, I just want to see the committee make a recommendation next time we meet because I was hoping to see a recommendation this time in a presentation and I really didn't see that.
Anyone from the Board of Education? Okay. Well, let's move on to Item four, the Combined Finance Department.
Sorry to interrupt. I was just wondering if you plan to pick a date for the next meeting tonight or if you were waiting.
Well, I think what we need to do is if Cheryl is going be giving the presentation, we need to get with her. Okay.
Okay. So Item four, the combined finance department. This item has been discussed, we, as a board of selectmen, have voted on this item to sit there and attempt to combine the finance department. At least I believe that to be the case. Know we've had multiple motions related to this, but combined finance department with a combined accounting system truly makes sense for our community. But we want to have some discussions as to why it may not work appropriately. I don't know who would like to sit there and discuss this in a manner, Laura or Eric or Barbara. We'll sit there and hear your issues related to why or why not. And anybody, the Board of Selectmen members or Board of Education members that would like to chime in, feel free. As far as I'm concerned, there has to be efficiencies within your software. If you can gain efficiencies within your software, you can sit there and reduce your number of staff in those departments. And combining it would hopefully give us all as a community more transparency. And really that's the goal of everything is to be more transparent and get more information from our financial records. So that's why we have discussed the combination of a combined
finance department between the Board of Education and the town.
Jeff, when you say you've discussed it or you've reached a decision about it, what are you proposing as far as
the makeup of a quote unquote finance department for the town? Well, that's what we were trying to discuss with you, Shannon. Okay. So you haven't decided that Let's go this way. We've wanted to pursue this as an option. We want to try to pursue a combined finance department. Our goal is to sit there and try to consolidate that and to have more of this. So Eric is now taking over our screen. So he's going to sit there and go. Great.
Eric, are you ready? Do you want to do this? Oh he's muted. Eric you got to unmute yourself. Amanda, can you hear me? Eric, I'm trying to unmute you.
Got it. Can you hear me now? Yes. I don't understand why whenever I share screen I can't unmute or mute function.
Gotta do it first. Yeah you gotta do it first. Okay,
I'll remember that in the future. So just to bring you up, here's what we talk, here's where we are now. Currently the town has a treasurer that's currently working twenty four hours a week. We have an assistant treasurer that's working thirty hours a week and Laura who is working I'm assuming thirty hours a week. I'm not actually sure. No, it's more. Okay. Okay.
We'll make that thirty plus hours a week. How about that? So ultimately what the Board of Selectmen has been looking at is getting to the point where we have a finance director that is not a full time employee but works probably in the twenty to twenty six hour range split between the school and the town and an assistant finance officer that would be a full time forty hour a week employee that would also work both for the town and the school. I had sent around to everyone basically proposed job descriptions and I did that taking our treasurer job description as well as the business manager job description I had from Laura and kind of separating into what I thought were logical bins for the top level person and the person that's doing the everyday bookkeeping and accounting. You know the other question that has been raised is what are we looking at for a timeline?
And so I'll tell you this is the rough timeline I had in the back of my head, but it's only mine. I'm not claiming that this is the final or this is the best or anything else. And that would be sometime around in the month of June coming up with the final decisions about positions and breakdown between the two. We are also as a town going to have to start doing negotiating with the union because our current assistant treasurer is a union position and I've been discussing that we have hired a lawyer to assist us in that portion of the process And I've talked through with him what needs to happen. That's relatively simple because we are basically taking an existing position and probably retaining it just at a higher level with a higher with a more sophisticated job description you know in understanding that we're not going to be keeping the same employee in that position. And then the other thing we're going to need to do is we're going to need to come up with some kind of joint panel for interviewing and picking the finance director and the assistant position. And I would suggest at a minimum we look at one maybe two outsiders. Don't know whose echo that is but I would suggest either Covenfrey Bolton's finance director. Bolton's finance Eric
pause. Amanda can you mute please again? Can you mute everyone except for Eric please? Yeah somebody just jumped on and there's an echo.
That was my fault. I'm having a problem with my computer here so I got out of my phone. I apologize. It's all set. Thank you Dan. We can move on. Thank you. Right on. So
my suggestion would be to consider if she'd be willing to serve, use Bolton's finance director because Bolton has gone through the combination process between their town and their school, and they run a combined office. And the other question I had in the back of my mind is, where does this all fit in with superintendent search? Because the superintendent obviously would be my counterpart in that whoever these two individuals are they would end up reporting both to the superintendent and to myself. So that's a little food for thought. July, sometime in July, start advertising for both positions and we need to talk about how and where to advertise. And presumably we would be looking for both internal and external candidates for this position. Beginning the interview process sometime in August, we would have to come up with a common list of questions we wanted to ask all the candidates and what we wanted out of the interview panel, and then come back to probably a combined board, a board of selectmen, board of education with a recommendation on what candidates, with the intention of getting them on board sometime in October, so that there's some overlap with existing employees for the transition. As Barbara alluded to earlier, the existing contract with the town treasurer runs through December 31. And I'm presuming we would keep the assistant treasurer on till sometime in that timeframe. I think we would have a much harder time negotiating with the union if we didn't, because keeping her on through that timeframe gets her five years and full buy in from the retirement for the town. So I think doing it short of that would be problematic. And then AES would have to make a decision what happens
position. Do they do a temporary one through December or how does that work? And that's obviously a school board decision, nothing that we so the other question I've had in the back of my mind is, are both of these town employees or do we say one's a town employee and one is an AES employee? If we did that, we'd probably be better off having the finance director be an AES employee and the assistant being a town employee because that's going to make the union negotiation easier. But whatever is chosen, you know, we'll work with. So as far as the timeline, that's what I have. If you want to, you've all seen what I listed for the job positions for the two. You know, when I asked for commentary back, the only real commentary I got back, I got back from Sally who felt it was important that the person that served as the finance director would also be a certified school business manager because that she felt that was important for that for her half of the job.
And that's basically what where I'm at unless you have questions for me. Hey Eric, Steve, can you go back up to the top on the current situation and just kind of refresh me? What's that number financially on the current for those three positions versus what is our expected number from the final?
Good question. The expected final, it depends a lot on what we're actually talking about paying employees. So we're going to end up with considerably less total hours. So what I would say is that having looked, done a search through CCM in a salary survey of the surrounding towns, a full time finance director, you know, at our level is somewhere around a $100,000 position, you know, plus or minus, say $10,000 We would be looking at basically half to two thirds of that cost plus benefits for the finance director position. And my guess is the assistant finance position is going to be somewhere in the 45 to $50,000 a year salary range. But that's my take on it. What that salary range is ultimately is is your decision not mine.
That's Can ask Michael to chime in on this right now and maybe just give us a little feedback if he has any? Yeah. Are you talking about the actual costs?
Yeah. I mean from a salary point of view is Eric's numbers reasonable? I mean from what you're saying. Yeah.
I think the amounts that he talked about in terms of a full time finance director is probably within the range. Probably on the higher side of the range actually for a smaller town. And then assistant finance officer again. Again that's to me the more critical position as well but I think that salary range is probably reasonable as well. Okay thank you.
Eric if I could ask a question what does Bolton structure currently look like right now?
I think they have a three person, either a three person or a four person finance department. Their finance director runs both, but I sort of think she oversees their tax collector and maybe the assessor's office too. So she's That's a little bit bigger a department, but I think she oversees a few more things.
Okay, thanks. Eric, have you reached out to them to see if, that could be a possibility for them to advise?
I have, I talked to her very briefly. I've also talked to, you know, their, my equivalent there about it a good bit. So yes, I think we could potentially, I know the person that's in Coventry, their finance director would definitely be willing to sit on a panel if we asked her to. I think the Bolton finance person would also, but I don't know that for sure.
Okay. Shannon any thoughts on what you'd like for a makeup of the interviewing group. Do you wanna do like two from each board or something and then Eric and then we'll have two advisors from outside that would Yeah. Guess
my input for right now, I feel like the time frame may be very, very quick. And I'm not trying to be a a stick in the mud here, but we've got a treasurer in in Barbara, who has a a contract through December. We at our last board of education meeting specifically didn't address, Laura's contract because we wanted to know what would come out of this meeting, see what we're gonna do there. But, a two or three month, you know, transition time period to try to figure out the, you know, rules and responsibilities, I think is is way too quick. As far as the makeup of a of a committee to look at putting together. I mean, you talking about forming a committee to actually deal with what we're going to have for
our finance department? Is that what you're asking, Adrian? No. We need a hiring committee. Right? Because they're working for both I first what we need is, and this is what I thought we would discuss here, is an understanding of what all I mean, I can see very well as can everybody else that we're seeming to go from three people down to two, but I don't understand it nor do we have any job description responsibility or whatnot for what is a finance director versus what is an assistance finance officer. What are the responsibilities of that? What are the roles? And how we're going from a finance director if that is more in a in a managerial situation where we've got Laura, who I know spends probably on average maybe thirty five hours a week as far as work down to a finance director who's not gonna do that with an assistant finance officer who's gonna be putting in more of the time. So I really need to have a much better understanding of what we're looking at as far as quote unquote finance director because a major issue that I've had as far as looking at a combining to create a finance department is,
and I know this has fallen to Eric a lot, is who's really responsible for for the human resources part? The contract negotiations, the, you know, dealing with all the stuff that we deal with our individual teachers and whatnot. So I really need to have a much better understanding before we do anything more of what we're actually agreeing upon with regard to what is a finance do we agree? You know, do the board of the selectmen and board of education agree that all we need to go forward is a finance director and assistant finance officer? If we agree on that, what are the responsibilities? I have that, Eric. What are the responsibilities of each of those? Do we agree on that? Because we haven't had any kind of an agreement in that regard so far. And one of the major reasons I wanted Laura's input on this meeting to her to be involved,
we're we've never done this before. So we're essentially No. That's not true. Hold on. A major concern that I have is as far as, you know, the town perspective versus the school perspective is we're talking about essentially, for lack of a better way to to define it, losing our advocate when it comes time to budget season, which is fine. It could be fine. But it's that's, you know, in my five years on the board, it's never how we've been we've operated, and I just haven't to need to better understand. Obviously, we're gonna have somebody whose responsibility it's gonna be to look out for the town as a whole, as far as all of the town's finances and not just for the school. But in losing our business manager, as far as the school's concerned, there are a lot of responsibilities there that I don't necessarily believe a finance director plus an assistance finance officer are gonna be able to accomplish.
So I guess my only point to that, there's a couple points. First of all, this was actually done before Sally and Laura came on board. This is how it was set up. We shared a top level person. Jill? Who
did you share who showed oh, as far as the town and and the school sharing somebody? Yeah. Time has never been that way. So that's why I'm asking It was like it was like that previous meetings that I went to, it emanated from this school, not necessarily from the town. Yeah? I'm sorry. Say that again?
Did the school not have a business manager before Laura?
Shannon, the the individual that would be the full time individual would probably spend the majority of their time dealing with board of education issues. The budget manager, I'm just going to give you my the budget manager would be the high level, sit there and understand that the financial statements are appropriate and that we have our budget organized and that we're doing things correctly from a high level perspective. So what we're saying is that or what I would believe would happen is that the individual that's there full time would spend as much time as necessary at the Board of Education to do everything that's required at the Board of Education, and then they would sit there and have less time. So let's say it was a forty hour job week, I would think you'd probably spend two thirds of your time at least at the Board of Education and a third of your time at the town. That's me. That's me giving you my take on what's going on. And in the past, the way that the town was operated previously was that high level full time person was at the Board of Education, and they were also responsible. They had the title of treasurer. Not well. Don't get me wrong, not well. Everybody knows, but not well. But that's how it was done, and it did get done. So now we're kind of circling back to what we need to get to as to the level of functionality we have. And so I would ask the Board of Education, we've had this out there for at least six months. Has the Board of Education had any discussions related to this matter besides
coming to this meeting? Not much, no. I mean, we just got these documents for our last board of education meeting as far as the job description for a potential finance director for the town of Andover, and that was for our meeting on May thirteenth last week. Okay.
So I guess my question is, Sally is still on here, right? When Sally became superintendent at the school, Laura was not here yet, correct? So who was doing all these roles and responsibilities before Laura got here? If when Sally got here is when we developed our own, our finance person. Can, can Sally tell us how this all worked before? Well, Jeff Jeff is
it was exactly what Jeff had described, which is more of a of a finance person for the school who also was supposed to be doing the treasurer responsibilities for the town, But it wasn't as Jeff just described, and I'll let him better describe because he would know more about that than I. You had If someone I can answer
Dan's question. Sure. When I came here, there was a person who functioned both at the Board of Education and at the town. At that point, the person in that position did spend really most of the time at the town doing the town requirements and everything of the person who was here. There were issues and that person moved on and we had some temporary help that came in for a while from EastCon. They sent a finance person over to keep things going for several months while we did a search for
the position that we currently have. So I guess what I'm gonna ask is what was broken? And second of all, who was doing these roles and the responsibilities that Shannon just spoke of? Did it fall back on the superintendent? Can someone answer that? I mean, seems like there are concerns about roles and responsibilities that were being done before that Laura's doing, but her position wasn't there
before you and her got here. So who was doing these roles and responsibilities before that? One second. Jeff Maguire, just so I can ask a question for Sally. Sally, did you sit there and say that the individual that was working for the town before that was doing the treasurer's work spent most of her time at the town? Yes.
Okay, that is absolutely not correct. That individual was 100% of her regular working day was at the Board of Education, and she came over there to reconcile the bank accounts for the town and be able to provide the information to the auditor in a format that he could put into financial statements. Well, what I can tell you, Jeff, is that
she was not up to speed. She did not have No, no, We weren't talking about
her skill level. I'm talking about where she was based Well, I know that she was over at the town
quite a bit. She She That's my memory of the whole situation when I came. Okay. So I'll sit there and I'll give you my memory because that was at the very beginning of my time on the Board of Selectmen. At the time I entered the bookkeeper from the town, we had a bookkeeper. That's all the town had was a bookkeeper. And she resigned. And the treasurerbusiness manager for the Board of Education was at the town, and she lasted maybe three months, and she resigned. And I believe that's I believe, Sally, you came in exactly at that same time. And then Laura came in immediately after that. And what we did is Laura went and worked for the Board of Ed and the town was dealing with, at that point in time, me as the town bookkeeper. And they brought in a treasurer and then I was asked not to do that work, which I did and I stopped and we brought in a treasurer and a bookkeeper. And the town had a part time treasurer and a bookkeeper and the Board of Education got Laura, which was the replacement for the individual that was at the Board of Education. Yes, but there was an interim
time again, you know, within there. And I know that the person again who had had, when I started, was doing whatever work for the First Selectmen's office. That's what I can tell you. Okay.
Yes. But the town had a bookkeeper. That's what the town had, was a bookkeeper. You know, in reality, what you're trying to get to is is someone to do transactional functions of the town and then someone to sit there and do the high level end of what we're doing, and part of this is it would almost be impossible to do
products like the way Eric laid out with the software that we currently have. We'll never be able to get it done with the software. We could if you had the right people, but and but that's the deal. So so Dan, your question was, who was doing the functional work? There was a person that I look at, in my recollection, was in Laura's position And then the town had a bookkeeper. And Laura or not Laura, but the person that was in Laura's position was doing all of the functional transactions for the Board of Education, inputting all of the checks, managing all of the payroll, doing all of that functional work, and then getting paid an additional stipend to come over and reconcile and put together the financial data for the town. That is correct. That's what my recollection was. No, your recollection is correct, Jeff.
So Shannon, were there any other duties that you were concerned about being covered that Laura's doing now that may not be done under this new plan?
Yeah. I mean, my major concern is just looking at what I know to be all of Laura's responsibilities and how those are going to be now divided up both between a finance director and an assistant finance officer and the town versus the school. So we've got, you know, two basic divisis there, you know?
Yeah. So specifically though, I I I guess because I wanna get into the meat and potatoes here. What specific roles are we talking about Just that aren't gonna be
a little bit to what you're saying Shannon and sort of hitting on what Dan is asking. One of the reasons we have the number of hours we currently have at the town is because we so many audit issues. When the person left from the school, the town got behind on the audits. We weren't getting them prepped correctly and they weren't getting done in a timely manner. The town got nearly what three years behind Michael, is that correct? We were like three years back. So Barbara has spent a lot of the last two years literally catching us up. We just now, this is the first year Michael just got finished. This is the first year we're actually on even close to having the right year audit done on time. So now that that's caught up, that's why we're finally looking to address this is because now we're caught up and we feel like we can trim back on the hours that we have. Barbara has already stepped back. She was working more hours. She stepped back to 24 and you know, now that the audits caught up, we feel like we can step back both positions. Now we can't automatically do it with the union position because we have to unfortunately negotiate that at this point but we believe that position is also very easily cut back at this point. And hopefully going to a combined person doing payroll so someone doing payroll for both sides because the town is going to electronic time clocks as well now. So that will help as far as our input and we're using outside payroll service anyways but still as far as checking payroll and what have you. I think the one thing that I have concern about looking at the whole list
is probably from your side Shannon is the ordering. Laura currently does a lot of the ordering for the school. That's probably the one thing I have concern about sort of picking up and I wonder if you you guys have a couple of secretaries up there is that a possibility that one of them can take on that one role. The other thing that probably needs to be ironed out which Eric is sort of looking into and I think again if we set up a committee maybe that's something the committee does on a smaller scale is we have five people sitting there trying to figure out what the breakup is for those job descriptions and how that works out. But realistically that's probably the one concern I have is the ordering side. I'm not sure how that was handled previously. I don't believe it was Scott, it was the, I I don't believe it was your finance person that was doing the ordering previously. So we have we have Sally on here, but we also have other people too. I mean, I'm I'm sure that would be able to answer that question as to who did all the ordering before.
Well, the other other thing I would say just as far as historical perspective here is I know that, Laura had done an extreme amount of work. You're talking about how you're finally caught up with regard to the perspective of the audits and whatnot. Laura, thank goodness, has finally gotten our financial bank accounts and all of our different funds so that they're understandable and and whatnot. I mean, there was just a significant amount of cleanup that has been done during Laura's tenure that makes it even tenable to consider moving forward with the combined finance department at this time. Excellent.
And think that was to Jeff's point is that, you know, the person that was here previously, although they were working for both sides, maybe wasn't as skilled as needed to be in that position. And that could have been a function of the pay scale, it could have been, I don't know. But certainly there was some up to snuff issues that had to be addressed both on the town side obviously and it sounds like also on the school side. So now that both of our respective departments have worked through that,
we'd like to that that's why we're looking at this as well is that Well, and Adrian, one of the other reasons I know that when I first heard this and was very interested in it, we're not reinventing the wheel here. I mean, we would not be the only town in Connecticut to combine these departments. Correct? I mean, this is done and this isn't something where we have to kind of we don't know if it's gonna work. It's working and has worked in other towns and I believe we reach out or talk to any of these other towns to see how it's working?
I have talked with some towns and generally speaking they seem to be working fine. I have some combined job descriptions for the joint positions as well, which I'll share with the board. It all depends on the specifics and how things are very clearly delineated and set up so everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing. I mean, that's really key. So job descriptions are essential. Eric's provided some beginnings to that. But there's still work to be done in
that area, no question. I think the other question is HR. And I don't know, maybe, Sally if you can speak to that or Laura as to what level of HR we need to address. Well, go ahead.
That's my biggest concern when I look at this is the amount of time I know that I spend on HR related stuff. And I use HR a little bit loosely. To me, that's the insurance benefits, the retirement benefits, the teacher TRB, the calculating of salary increases. There's just a minutiae amount of detail that goes into managing employees. And then when I look at the combined, I'm fearful that we're asking a lot from this assistant full time finance officer. So now we're combining payrolls. So now that's payroll every week.
Laura, you don't actually do the checks yourself. It goes to a service, correct? No, but there's
input involved. It's not automatic. We don't need to combine payroll. You do it on off weeks. It's already set up as off weeks. I don't sit there and see why you wouldn't keep it that way. All I'm saying, Jeff, is that right now you do it every two weeks. We do it every two weeks. If we were to keep that schedule, mine is on a different two weeks than yours. So now this person is doing a payroll every single week. There's certain things I don't think the town is strong on that we encounter a lot on the board side, family medical leave. We get at least three or four a year. There's a lot of paperwork involved knowing the steps, knowing the notifications. So there's just a lot of management of having employees that you just need to be aware of. So who did all this before you came in? They weren't done well. Woah.
Woah. Woah. One at a time. Thanks. I can't I heard three different things. Let me finish the HR
question. All of the hiring of all the employees in industry comes through my office. So we do all of that, you know, we advertise, we get resumes, do the interviewing, we do all of that kind of thing through superintendent's office. So HR as a function is really split. It's split between Laura and it's split between, again, my office.
Thank you. When you say your office, Sally, is that your is that your secretary or you?
Well, it's me. I mean, she does the paperwork, but in terms of getting checking references, you know, getting all of the credentials reviewing everything contacting previous employers. Do that the the secretary Diane who serves a multitude of functions within the office, you know, takes care of some of the paperwork, obviously, but essentially that all comes through, you know, my office. Oh, well that makes it a little better.
So I'll ask you again, who who did all this before you brought Laura in?
Well, a lot of this stuff was really not done. It was all farmed out. We had, you know, we had the part time finance helper we had a technology person that took care of that and so some of it just plain wasn't done
you know part of so what you're saying is that no one filed for FMLA no one needed other HR stuff I mean I find it hard I find it hard to believe that none of this stuff wasn't done before you came in. And I guess I'm just, you know, I'm not trying to be difficult here. I'm just trying to get the layout of how things used to be done, why they were changed to, like how were they not working and why were they changed?
So the reason they weren't done was probably just not the person not having knowledge that they needed to be done. I know for sure FMLA notifications were not done. Okay. So when So
Dan, they were done, not done well. Let's just go with that. I mean, they got done by the individual that was working at the Board of Education, but not done well. I mean, Laura came in and did inherit a mess, you know. Barbara came in and inherited a mess.
Other things, Dan, like you're asking about is union negotiations. My predecessor didn't get involved with doing the economics of that. I provide that information. So then who did that?
Nobody. You Who did attend to me? The lawyer that gave the presentation said he used to, you know, at one point just come in and handle all the negotiations and it was a handshake. That doesn't happen anymore.
I'm aware of I'm I'm aware of how it works now. I'm trying to figure out how it was working then. And I suppose I've grilled you guys. Now I'm going to turn the tables here just so that I kind of know why I understand that things are better now, but why would we go back to doing it the way that things were if they got into such a big mess that they had to be undone with creating this opposition?
Because you have the opportunity to do it. We're trying, we're all here if our primary job on this is, well, your primary job is to provide a quality education to your your your children and and and we share in that desire but we also have fiscal responsibility so we're trying to find ways that we can save money and I understand that they're our children but what I I guess what I'm saying this is
if we had this position before, right? Try to follow me here. If we had this position before and it wasn't working out to the point where Laura's position was created and things were fixed, why would we go back to something that we could potentially that would break again and that would have to be fixed again in the future? What safeguards are we going to take to prevent that from occurring again?
You have better management. I mean you have a top administrator in place. You have many other issues that that you know can assist us to not get to the same situation we were before. You hire the proper person. I mean, and that doesn't mean that Laura is could not be hired for this position. She may not want it, but she can be hired for this position. We could hire the appropriate person.
Yeah. I mean, I I think, Dan, you know, your your point is really valid. And I I think the difference is in the past as we as we all know, unfortunately, the town was not really well managed in a lot of places. We feel like we're in a much better position now and we feel like now's the time to take the opportunity to try to get a better continuity financially throughout the town, and allow us to to save some money in the process. Mean listen as as you know listening to the board of finance meetings and the board of selectman meetings and obviously in your own board of ed meetings literally $10,000 here and $5,000
there it all adds up over time. Know? Yeah. And and I understand that. I'm just and I'm I'm not trying to give you a hard time. I'm trying to put this all on paper and look at what the best decision for my board is going to be. And I just feel and I I just feel like, you know, yes, we are in a much better spot and things are being run much better across all boards. I guess what I'm saying is I don't, I feel that we tend to move too quickly on some things and we tend to drag things out on other things. I just wanna make sure that we're finding that in between and we're doing this the right way so we don't end up with a broken Listen, system
your original question and comment, I don't think you're giving anyone a hard time. I think the whole reason that this came up in the first place is we started talking to other towns about what they did to streamline and and find some efficiencies and this was one of the things that came up repeatedly. So that's that's what started this conversation. And then we had to ask ourselves, do we feel like we're in a position to be able to do this now? We have a town administrator that's in place that's gonna stick around. Do we have, you know, do we have a good long term solution and we feel like there's a bunch of things that are happening that we feel lend itself towards this, whether it be the software changes, things like that.
All this sort of plays together to to maybe make, a better continuity for everybody.
So I think just I don't know the best way to say it. It just feels like what we've got or what what's been said is the town now has their finances well in order so that the financial reporting, the auditing and whatnot can easily or much more easily be done. And what we've said is Laura has brought the school to the position where it's much easier for her having combined all the accounts and the funds and whatnot that were in existence five years ago that no longer are there. I'm wondering if it if it I don't know. If it makes sense to have a town treasurer slash bookkeeper and a finance manager for the school. And I I don't know. I'm still having trouble with what I know to be all the requirements for a school business manager at and as Sally's input was given to us, you know, to have somebody who's a certified school business manager to be in that position. So what what do we know from Bolton now they've done it or whatnot, in moving away from that?
Well, mean, I I I think your point, Shannon, is that, you know, it's very hard and I it's very hard to get two boards. You know, you have we have five members. You guys have how many? 10. Seven. So we're trying to get 11 people, a superintendent. You know what I'm saying? So we're trying to get
It's good thing you're not the treasurer, Adrian. That makes 12 people. That's good. Trying to trying to get 12 people plus Sally plus
us a a principal. You have all these people throwing in trying to meld these two offices. It makes it would make more sense for us to put together a committee, go out and see you know what other towns because Sally is saying that you need a business certification maybe that Bolton person doesn't have it, maybe the person in other towns don't have it. If they do then that's the appropriate thing to do. If they don't and it's working well then maybe we don't need that. And it's a nice thing to have but maybe it's something we don't need. So I think we need to look at those things from how are other let's not reinvent the wheel. If it's working well in other towns, let's sort of copy that and and and make it see if it it can fit. I don't wanna say make it work here because if it doesn't, then we shouldn't do it.
But it makes sense to instead of trying to get 12 of us to agree and hash out this thing and send 60 emails back and forth, Let's take two people from your board and two people from ours, you know, and and put this together and and try to put together a recommendation as to what it looks like. Then come back to both of these boards with what we think it should look like and something that we think will work. Or maybe we come back to these boards and say it doesn't work in our case because we're too small in this particular situation. But let's figure that out in a smaller group instead of 12 of us sort of hashing at this.
Would that be That's fine with me. That's fine with me. My concern was, again, the timeline that we were being presented with. And I feel like we also have two considerations in you already have a treasurer who has a contract through December, correct? And Barbara, who's no longer apparently on this call. And how long what is the current contract for the assistant treasurer?
The assistant treasurer is a union position, so her position ends when we make it end through union negotiation or she quits or she dies, basically.
Do you have a current assistant treasurer? And does she have a contract? There is no contract. It's a union.
So she, well, okay. So she has a, her union contract is through 2022, I believe. But that does not mean that that can't be modified in the interim to, and look, the town has hired a labor attorney to assist us in that prop because it is going to end up being a union negotiation.
And Shannon, we have modified union negotiations with our union positions in the last four years. We did it with the tax collector. We've done it with other departments. I mean, listen, this just comes down to can we have some savings by combining the departments? That is the question. And what we need to do for both boards is provide the necessary information and work. We have to provide the same level of work with less people on a new software. The question is, can we do it or can't we? Really, that's what it comes down to. Correct. So Adrienne is correct. Let's just
put it out to a smaller group, but to me, I go to what Dan Foran said, some things we do slow and some things we might do too fast. I've never seen anything in our town do anything too fast. The only thing we did too fast was was get an administrator's position put into our town, and that was an ungodly success. Thank you, Eric. So, most of the stuff in our town we do too slow.
I I think if we do our legwork and we try to bang out a couple of meetings over the summer, if let's say we put this together tonight, we try to get a meeting the first week of June, do two meetings say in June, maybe, and then another one beginning in July, we should be able to, you know, come back and say to our boards, yes, we'd like to do this. This is what the structure looks like and then go out to hire. If if it works, if it doesn't, then we come back and say this isn't gonna work and and go from there. We currently have Barbara's agreement goes through December, it is extendable as long as both parties agree. So just like any other position, if somebody gets to the end of their contract and says we don't wanna go on, then she has that option. But currently it's January and both parties have the option of extending as long as everyone's in agreement. So so we have some flexibility on our side. Obviously, it sounds like you guys have not finalized your contract with Laura. So that would be up to you That's
what we need to do. Yeah. What you wanna do there, you know, and and whether, you know, what Laura's situation is, which if she wants to apply for this. Because again, internally, we have to we we certainly have to offer at least the positions that our person is qualified. Position if if that bookkeeper position is something we agree on, then we would have to offer that to our employee as well. And you may actually have an employee over at the school that wants it, we don't know. And then for the the higher level position, maybe Laura applies for that. Again, that's that's up to her and and and you guys. So, you know?
Yeah. I mean, we're we did not finalize Laura's contract. She goes on our fiscal year contracts. So her contract right now is up on June 30. Yep. And unlike the town, we we were where it might crunch is right as we're preparing our budget or Laura typically prepares our budget is when you have Barbara's current contract concluding. So I don't see that we're gonna mean, that's for the board of education to address, not for the board of selectmen. Just to put it out there, January is when we're deal we're starting to deal with our budget. Well, we're we're starting to deal with budgets actually in December
and through that whole time frame. So it's the same for us.
I'm just saying you hired somebody through December and for us to hire Laura through December doesn't make a lot of sense.
No, I guess my point is if we went forward with this, I think the goal would be, if it's Laura, let's say Laura applies to the submission and takes it, well then that sort of mutes the point. But if it's not Laura and it's an outside entity that that ends up taking this or applying for it and deciding to do it, We have no reason and one of the reasons we extended, I shouldn't say extended, we asked Barbara to extend her contract because her initial offer was to October is what she wanted. We asked her to go to December so that we would have some overlap between someone coming in and her leaving. And we would assume that the school would wanna do the same thing. So if we agree on this by July, the end of July or mid July, we have an agreement as to what this looks like and we can go to hire if it takes us you know September 1 or October 1 to hire, hopefully we're bringing that person in for October, November, December that would be your overlap. So you would have whether it's Laura and the other person there till December or what have you. Again, that's your decision how you wanna handle it on your side. On our side, we decided that three months worth of overlap was appropriate.
Yeah, and the only other major crunch here is we're gonna have a brand new superintendent who we're now in the process of trying to hire and we're also dealing with brand new financial software that we're trying to do. And I think trying to do all three things at the same time might, it's a little, little onerous, but we can do it. We're, we're in the process. We have a superintendent search going on right now. Now we're trying to deal with the financial department and financial software. So we'll see what we can do. We also are supposed to be having contract negotiations with our noncertified employees that has been put on hold with all the pandemic and whatnot. So Yeah.
And our certified contract is up for negotiation next year. So Okay. You know, And it's
may I add with, you know, with the current pandemic and stuff like that, very busy trying to look at what's going to happen in the fall as well as far as at the school goes.
So would you agree that we can put something together to try to come back to the board say by no later than mid July?
I don't know that I can agree to that. I mean, I I think we're gonna need a superintendent input here too. What I think we should do is is exactly what you said, which is get a joint committee going. Let's deal with looking at how other towns do it and and go from there. I'm
My only point to the superintendent thing is if we left it alone, the superintendent isn't gonna have any say, they're gonna come into whatever they come into, right? Like they're gonna come into Laura and if we're hiring to replace Barbara, they're gonna come into what we have on the town side. So what's the difference whether the superintendent has a say in this position or Let's
ask this question, Shannon. You willing to sit there? Can we have a committee?
Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get at. Adrian's Let's do
point was okay, let's get a committee and give the committee a short timeline to come up a recommendation so we solve all the problems that we're trying to get to. Correct. Let's do a committee is what I would like to do. The issue is if in my mind we need to move faster, then we have to have a shorter timeline. I mean, if we want to go slow, then, you know, you put it off for a year and we put everything into the budget 100% and that's, you know I I don't think that's in the town's best interest. So how quickly can the Board of Education get together and select two members? Well, let's sit there and say we have a five member committee. Is that acceptable or do you want more? So you get two, we get two and who's the fifth? We take somebody from the outside. We have to publish this. We have to do this correctly. We can't just appoint people willy nilly with anything else. We have to have Eric put in the paper. It's going to take
Eric, what is it, two weeks to sit there and and do the advertising that we have to have? Or is it five days? Which is the number?
Well, no. But you're not we're talking about two members from their board, two members from our board. We can pick that right now. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. So if we do two and two and then we have whether it's, you know, Eric or whoever is is the fifth person. And then if we decide that we're gonna move forward, if we get to the we get to July whatever and we decide we're going to move forward, then we go and get outside people. I think it's premature to go and ask them now until we decide that this is going to work personally.
Okay. I mean I understand that. I'm just we'll have to sit there and make a request more about something. So four five members, who do you want it to be, Shannon? Do you have an issue I'm to put it out. All my board is right here. So who wants to who's thinking they want to be on it? You're all muted.
I'm not muted. I mean, you know, from a legal perspective and with my lawyer background, I I think it would be helpful to have me on it. But I'm on all the other committees too, so I don't know what to do in that regard. I think it would be helpful Eric, I see you're unmuted. I think it would be helpful to have two two members from each committee. And Eric, could you be also part of that committee? I'm certainly willing to serve on that committee. Okay, good.
I mean, I'd be happy to serve on that one if we need somebody from the board of ed side. Who was that? Chris. That was Chris. Chris.
And Shannon, one question I have is, does it make sense, because we brought it up a few times regarding the superintendent to have the superintendent as any part of this committee being as they'll be
probably the closest related to? Not right now in that I think that we need to, as a town, determine what we're gonna do with our financial positions before, to Adrian's point, the superintendent has to deal with what what the town decides is best for for itself.
Okay. So we have Chris. And me. And Shan. Okay. Is that acceptable? Do you want to take a vote? Do you want to sit there? Anybody well, who's who do you who do you offer up as your, as your, victims? I'm ask I'm to ask the Board of Selecting members who would want to be participate in that committee. Anyone? I
think I spoke over somebody. Who was the other person? Your chair. Oh Jeff's on it? Yeah. Paula do you want to join me?
Paula, Jeff, Scott, Adrian, which one of you? I thought Adrian was gonna jump in there. No I'm I'm fine doing it I I don't have a problem.
I'll make time. Jeff Murray would you like to do it? I will gladly let you take over. No thanks. Nice. Scott? Scott's gonna keep Scott's it on gonna stay mute. I
already have too much going on in this town. I'm with you Scott. All right. Okay so that's Adrian and myself.
Chris and Versus Chris and me. Versus. It's not a versus. No it absolutely is versus. I spoke correctly. Versus. It's not I'm a versus teasing Jeff. Yes. Us.
All right. Let's go. So is that the final discussion on the combined finance department for right now? Does anyone else, any other board member have any other issues? Lots of issues. Let's just limit
it to the finance department, okay? So we all can be discussed. All right. Public speak.
Unless anybody has other comments. Anybody else? Any other board member want to say anything? We don't need to make a motion or anything like that. I just want to make sure we're doing this the right way so we don't lose another
You're probably right, Paula. So let's make a motion to appoint I love it when Paula's here.
I move to create a joint committee between the board of selectmen and the board of education consisting of Jeffrey McGuire, Adrian Mandeville, Shannon Loudon and Chris Bernard, and Eric Anderson as our town administrator for the purpose of discussing the financial positions in the town of Andover and the Andover Elementary School. I'll second that.
All those in favor any further discussion? Anybody? I'm supposed to do that? Nobody? All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Jeff Murray you good? No, okay. All right. So that is the end of Let's move to public speak. Amanda if you're still on.
I am here. Better be. She's taking notes. I'm not there's anyone from the public still available. Yes, there are. I just wanted to confirm how many votes that was. A lot. Was 12. It 12?
Ball zero zero. The Paul Newman movie. Twelve twelve angry people.
Yeah. But Lisa's Lisa's not on the call. Oh, Lisa Hewitt's not on the call. Apologize. 11. I just Thank you, Paula. I feel like someone else is missing. Yeah, there's somebody else missing.
We got all five of our board and then you've got I don't see data. Dan's down down here. I'm still here. Dan,
Steven, Shannon Cindy and me. Yeah. So you're just missing Lisa from Yep. Pretty good. All right. Thank you. Public speak.
I'm gonna I want to I want to I know I'm not part of the public but I do want to say something. I want to thank Michael Vanderveer from our accounting firm for putting up Vandervender. And staying on the phone and staying on the call with us. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. You're welcome. All right. That's it for me. I'm sorry. Anybody else okay I'll go through we have Kimberly Persson I'm all set just listening thank you thank you mrs. Bush I'm good thank you for asking thank you Melissa Lachuska I'm good thank you Jenny Morell
just going through and see if I have any comments nothing for me thank you Okay. Okay. Think that's it. Who's Nick Levine?
Oh, Nick is from CBC. Nick, you're always welcome to participate. Okay.
So just it's not a public speaker or whatnot, but just who's gonna take the reins as far as trying to set up or coordinate the first meeting of the committee that we just established. The first meeting will be tomorrow at 7AM. We'll send out the meeting announcement. How
about how about Shannon, you and I get together and we talk about it tomorrow and we do it soon, sooner than later. Sounds good, Jeff. Have it tomorrow afternoon.
Done. Great. Come up with a up with a list of days, send them out and we'll we'll start to book it as quick as we can. Okay.
And Michael signed off, but he said he's gonna reach out to his other clients and he wants to maybe tighten up the staffing to try to see how other towns are doing it a little bit more for us. So he's gonna try to reach out and get back to us so that we'll have that. Okay.
So do we wanna call ourselves the finance department committee or what? Why do we name this committee? Sounds awesome. Okay. Sounds wonderful. Okay. We're on item six right now. Anybody? Anybody?
I have one further question, I guess. Is this appropriate time to ask anyone from the Board of Finance about the budget and where we stand with that? Did you say Board of Finance? Nobody's on for the Board of Finance, Dan. Oh, I thought okay. My apologies. I thought we were supposed to have a representative from the BOF here as well.
No. They have a meeting at the end of the month, though. Their meeting is on May 27. Yeah. They're gonna It
was my understanding that we were gonna have some sort of out representation here from them. My apologies. It's okay. Mark was
to attend. I was gonna ask. Mark wasn't able to attend. So I was hoping that he would be able to join us, but he wasn't able to. They're they're currently doing public,
you know, public comment and collecting that and then they're gonna make a decision at the, on the twenty seventh. Okay. Anyone else? Okay. Item six is adjourned. I move to adjourn.
Anybody want to second Second it. Great. All right. Thank you very much for putting putting in the time. I greatly appreciate everyone. Thank you very much. Good Good night everyone. Good night. Good night.