THE CHALLENGE

The Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce, a community organization of business professionals supporting the economic vitality of the Dallas metropolitan area, had been using a 10-year-old computer system and an outdated accounting application. Written in a language typically reserved for highly technical engineers, the accounting software had demanded extensive custom programming.

The chamber administers numerous business, community and educational programs, each of which has a distinct "program group" hierarchy subdivided into departments. Separate expense and revenue accounts are required for the numerous programs and respective subdivisions.

"Many of the functions we needed the system to perform had to be hard-coded, requiring a programmer, and that was expensive," says Nancy Cheshier, the Dallas Chamber's director of accounting. The chamber decided it needed to make a change.

THE SOLUTION

Cheshier set out to find a powerful accounting program that could be molded to the chamber's highly individual needs and modified easily without a programmer. After installing a new computer system utilizing Microsoft Windows NT and SQL Server, MAS 500 was identified as the best accounting solution for this environment.

While price and support were factors in favor of MAS 500, Cheshier says she was convinced by one irrefutable demonstration. "Government regulations require us to track vendor information in a particular manner that's not customary for accounting software," explains Cheshier. She says the software was configured in 15 minutes to handle those requirements.

Following installation of MAS 500 in November 1996, the chamber uploaded data during December and ran financials live on the new program in January. Cheshier says she was thrilled by its performance.

"On the old system, running financials was a headache. I'd have to run journal entries, post them, run the general ledger, run an update to the report writer, then run the financial statements. The process consumed an hour or more," she recounts. "MAS 500 does it all in five minutes."

Cheshier applauds the program's prompt screens that helped her upload the chamber's prior year's chart of accounts through Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, giving her the means to run comparative financial reports. MAS 500 also has enabled her to post accounts payable information into the general ledger by vendor name rather than by vendor number, an invaluable aid to the research required for staff support. In addition, the system allows her to shift reporting modes from the departmental focus she uses for internal reporting to expense function reporting required by the IRS.

"The greatest strength of MAS 500 is its flexibility," says Cheshier. "It helps make a difficult job much easier."