Fall 2017 Investments
Excerpt |
---|
Summary of Fall 2017: This semester our team has been successful in the research and initial development of an accounting tool intended to aid AguaClara at Cornell, APP, and the individual communities in efficiently gathering, reporting, and summarizing financial data integral to the successful execution of plant operations and potential to receive impact investments. Our experimentation with the tool using real data from the plants in Honduras has led to the conclusion that this tool will most likely be suitable for our needs. Our next steps include getting feedback on the tool and hopefully sending members from the team down to Honduras to help implement it. In addition we have compiled a list of potential impact investors that we feel value similar social impact to AguaClara and fit our financial needs for the construction of future plants. We look forward to securing our next location large enough to be funded by an investment rather than a grant and putting together financial materials to present to potential investors to secure that funding. The questions the investments team addressed during the fall 2017 semester were:
|
...
Accounting Tool Preliminary Research: The investments team researched several accounting softwares in addition to Quickbooks, and selected Quickbooks to use as the basis for the accounting tool. The other softwares researched were:
- Accufund
- Designed for government or municipal projects
-Many of the features in place in this system are designed for the ease of reconciling problems that towns and cities face, rather than an organization like AguaClara- AguaClara needs a simplistic report
- More accounting knowledge would be necessary to utilize this tool - would need to be taught to plant operators
- Not as user-friendly as QuickBooks
- ZipBooks
-Uses cloud based accounting platform
-Could be an effective way to cut cost costs
-Drawbacks:- System is cloud based
- Not applicable in places with unreliable wifi
- No Spanish language support
- Unclear who has ownership over data
- FreshBooks
-Similar to QuickBooks
-Uses cloud based accounting platform - UltraTax Accounting CS
-Unclear whether it is was translatable to Spanish
-Many functions are more complicated than the simple tools
-Unclear whether it’s customizable
...
Section | ||
---|---|---|
Members Nicolette Ocasio Jenny Chan Jonathan Tsang Aditi Athavale
|