The Calm Before the Storm

Officially it's Tax Season (our own 1040 Form arrived in the mail on Tuesday, January 2nd, didn't yours?) but nothing's going on - no software loaded, no shoeboxes full of receipts darkening the door, no "Important Tax Documents" being mailed in or out.

I whiled away some hours Monday evening spending quality time with a favorite non-profit accounting program of mine. This one has numerous quirks, but what wigs me out is that if you enter a date in mm/dd/yy format, like any reasonable person would, this program blithely posts it to the first decade of the last century. Then your opening balances are all out of whack (because of that little entry from one hundred years ago) and you can't figure out what the heck happened. Admittedly this program has been around since before the year 2000, but they issued their most recent upgrade last spring, and they still hadn't fixed this one.

(To make matters worse, I was doing this on my own time, and not on the company nickel. SGH uses the phrase "thankless and unrewarding" to describe many of my extra-curricular endeavors and he might just possibly have a point here.)

Also on the subject of software upgrades, I notice the QB 2007 default chart of accounts comes with an expense account called: "Ask My Accountant". Maybe they should just call it "Shoebox".

At least it is an expense account and not an Owners Equity account. True story which informs much of my mistrust of QB: Years ago I worked with an inexperienced, somewhat dim tax preparer (OK, that would have been me). I was given a QB data file to restore and work with. The client hadn't reconciled the bank account in quite a while, so I set to it. After an hour or two I was in a complete tangle, so I pushed the "Reconcile Now" button. And behold! The screen told me: "Congratulations! Your account reconciles!" Of course underneath that it said, "$238,475.63 has been posted to Opening Balance Equity." But how could I not feel good about myself when the screen had confetti and balloons all over it?

Beware of any accounting program that works hard to build your self esteem.