QuickBooks Restoration: Nashua Senior Center

A Sustainable Foundation Demands Fiscal Clarity

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The Nashua Senior Center provides a wide range of services to thousands of residents in the Nashua region. With limited resources, staff focused their efforts on the most important priorities – providing recreational, educational and wellness activities for seniors. Volunteers with limited knowledge of accounting or the QuickBooks system helped with bookkeeping duties, but over time, multiple overlapping QuickBooks categories, accounts and classes made it difficult for management and the board to have a clear view of the financial operation of the center.

The solution was to restructure the QuickBooks installation so that revenue and expenses could be consistently categorized and tracked. We eliminated and consolidated unnecessary and duplicate categories and accounts, and updated historical transactions to make use of the new structure. We created a new annual budget that was aligned with the updated structure along with monthly reporting capabilities that detailed performance against target on an ongoing basis. Staff was trained on the restructured system and consistent accounting procedures were put in place.

Management was given the capacity to evaluate the bottom line effectiveness of development activities and efforts could be directed to the most valuable opportunities. Fiscal conditions could be accurately monitored in order to operate efficiently in a resource constrained environment. Most importantly, fiscal transparency allowed future strategic decisions to be made with confident awareness of the center’s financial health.