Volunteer expenses

[Elena Iñurrategui]

Hi!
My name is Elena and I work at Wingu (www.winguweb.org) an Argentine
non-profit which mission is to help other non-profits to use tecnology
to reach there missions. We use Netsuite at Wingu internally, and we
are helping others to use it.

My question:
Is there a way to massively import volunteer expenses (I will and
volunteers as staff, is that ok?). We don´t have more than 5 users, so
we can´t give each volunteer a user. But they have plenty of expenses
every day! We are thinking that the best way us to create a form
(google form for ej), so every volunteer upload the expenses, export
to an excel and then massively imported. Is that the correct way?

Who is anyone managing this?

Thanks a lot!!!
Elena

[geilhufe]

Sounds like this is your scenario:
(1) You have 100 volunteers. They incur expenses that you then
reimburse.
(2) On the accounting side you need to approve the volunteer expenses,
cut checks and monitor spending in this category.

Assumptions:
(1) Each volunteer is a customer record (so you can send them email,
track donations, etc.)

Option 1 (simplest & cheapest - no cost)
Volunteers are both customer records and vendor records
(1) In NetSuite, every volunteer is BOTH a customer and a vendor (in
the customer record, you'll see a field called "other relationships" -
add "vendor").
(2) Volunteers fill in a google form with their expenses.
(3) You create a NetSuite import file from the spreadsheet input.
(4) Import expenses as vendor bills (email address is the best unique
field to use for matching).
(5) Process the bills as you would any other bill.

You can create a special item "volunteer reimbursements" and tie that
back to a "volunteer reimbursement account in your chart of accounts.
To track volunteer hours in this model, you'd have to use a similar
data collection + import process as outlined above.

Option 2
Employee center
This option makes sense if your volunteers can enter expenses directly
into NetSuite (think about whether they can be trained, if they are
tech savvy enough, etc). This would remove the Google spreadsheet step
in option 1.
Cost is $20/mo per 5 volunteers (@ 80% discount rate) or $50/mo per 5
volunteers (@ 50% discount rate)
(1) Volunteers are both customer record and employee records.
(2) Each volunteer has a login
(3) Volunteers login and enter their expenses & time -- you can also
collect some custom data as well.
(4) Expenses are routed to approval, bill, print check the same as any
other transaction.

Option 3 (Most Powerful)
Volunteers are partners
This option leverages all the functionality of NetSuite to its
fullest. For common volunteer management use cases, however, the ROI
is probably not worth it. This option is compelling if your volunteers
interact with the database in much the same way staff do,
Cost is $10/mo per volunteer (@ 80% discount rate) or $25/mo per
volunteer (@50% discount rate)
Partners can enter time & expenses AND do virtually anything an
employee can do in the system.

[Elena Iñurrategui]

Yes.. scenario (1) is where I´m at, but with 600 volunteers.
Because of the cost, I think I will implement Option 1.

Thanks a lot!
Elan