Cord Ministries has outgrown the QuickBooks Online system. There are four primary reasons we’ve come to this conclusion:
We are being pressed to move to a true “Fund Accounting” system, which no matter what QuickBooks says, they are not.
We need to have multiple people working on the accounts at the same time and this is expensive with QuickBooks.
The QuickBooks Online system is old technology that is limiting our work.
There is no integrated donor management system with QuickBooks.
These are pretty severe and non-negotiable reasons but we have a huge time, energy, training, and data investment in QuickBooks so we are hesitant to move to another system.
It’s a pretty big deal to get written up in a blog post!
RStudio, the company that publishes the tools to write software in the “R” computer language chose our little application to share with the “R” programming world.
The Thailand Mapping application worked very well and the Thai authorities were impressed – which was probably the most important part of the project.
Since a model is only as good as the data we chose to use the actual giving data for 2017 to investigate different methods for calculating the Cord Ministries administrative charges for our people and projects.
Cord Ministries International is a not-for-profit organization that handles the “back office” tasks for about 100 people and projects. These people and projects are located Czech Republic, Honduras, Israel, Africa, USA, and mostly in Thailand. One of our main jobs is to maximize the donation throughput to the people and projects we serve.
One of our main concerns is balancing the trade-offs between the many small donations and the few large donations that we process as we consider how to charge our administrative fee.
Number of Donations vs. Total Donation Amount by Account Number
If we charge a fixed cost against each donation, say simply the total expenses of providing our services divided by the total number of donations, then a huge percentage of each of these small gifts gets eaten by the administrative charges and the large gifts have only a tiny percent going for the administrative expenses. Small gifts subsidize large gifts – that doesn’t seem right. Continue reading “Cord Ministries Donation Income Investigation Tool”
My nephew runs a medium-sized Amazon Retail Arbitrage business and asked me to put some Big Data analysis to some of his sales data.
He hypothesized that his internet business was reaching out to people who lived inconveniently far from a “Big Box Store” and if he could find a way to optimize his advertising to them he could increase his sales.
He asked me to Geo-Map his sales based on his Amazon sales report data so he could look at it to test his hypothesis.
There is more analysis that could be done – but he’d have to pay for that and the business isn’t that big yet. But, after looking at the map, he’s rejected his hypothesis and is working on a new theory.
Unfortunately, this “R” Languagesoftware is proprietary so all I can show is one of the output maps that zoomed out too far to be useful…
Thermoelectric Peltier Device Air Conditioning Equipment Simulator
The Cell Phone Tower Machine Room Advanced Temperature Control Unit project requires a way to simulate a full-blown air conditioning system. This is obviously not possible in my home office setting – although Ron, my boss and partner in this endeavor, has a full test system in his shop!
Cell Phone Tower Machine Room Advanced Temperature Control Unit Prototype
Cell phone towers are everywhere. At the base of each tower is a small “machine” room that houses all the telephone equipment needed for the site. Most of this equipment is electronic and it is important that it keeps running no matter what – we can’t stop playing our Pokémon Go…
Actually, cell-based telephone service is a robust service that is a world unto itself. The machine rooms are full of industrial-grade equipment meant to take a beating and provide service under extreme conditions. One of those conditions is loss of power. This means that each machine room has an extensive battery backup system in addition to all the communications and computer electronics. Continue reading “Cell Phone Tower Machine Room Advanced Temperature Control Unit”
Working as a Project Manager for multiple for-profit and not-for-profit organizations I have seen a lot, I mean a lot, of project reports. Some of the places I’ve had the opportunity to work for are really in to project reporting, some not so much.
Learning Big Data tools I’ve often had questions of my own that I’ve asked myself. One was, can I get a measure of project report “quality” without actually reading the report? Can I look at all the reports in the organization and find good project report writers? Can I find projects that consistently produce good project reports? Bad project reports? How do my own project reports stack up to others? How does the “quality” of the project reports change over time? Does project report “quality” have any relationship to project “quality”? Continue reading “Quick Analysis of Selected Project Reports to Determine Project Reporting “Quality””
Way back in the “Thailand Days” several of us guys helped run the Grace International School Tech Club. We had a lot of fun working with high school students making cool things. Together we made multiple robots using the the Arduino microcomputer platform.
However, this project started out as a pollution monitoring project. Chiang Mai, Thailand suffers from sever seasonal pollution, mostly as a result of agricultural burning in the hottest time of the year. The pollution is so severe that students are kept indoors on the worst days.
Back about 2012, the US Consulate donated an research-grade Met One E-Sampler Particulate Monitor to the school for us to operate and publish the air pollution status to the community. This was really touchy technology and we fought internet battles to keep the sight up. But, with help from Chiang Mai University we measured the weight of smoke, calibrated this very high-tech device, and used it until it broke.
Ken with the Met One Pollution Monitor mounted at the Grace International School soccer field.
Actual air pollution captured by the Met One device. This was taken to the Chiang Mai University laboratory where it was cleaned, dried, and weighed to calculate the actual amount of pollution in a given volume of sampled air.Ken with Chiang Mai University air pollution research scientist at the Chiang Mai University Air Pollution Research Station.
After multiple attempts to keep this device operational we gave up and switched to a more DIY solution. Working with Andrew May, the head of the Grace International School Science Department, and Adrian Oliver, the owner/operator of the PocketWeather application we built a set of simple, but accurate and reliable, pollution monitors that we could operate ourselves based of the Nova Fitness Laser PM2.5 Sensor–SDS011 module. The spec sheet for the SDS011 can be downloaded here.
My first version was Arduino based and operated as one of the official Chiang Mai, Thailand pollution monitoring sites, along with Grace International School. When we moved back to Michigan I changed over to a home-built Raspberry Pi version to be more like the others monitoring devices in the set.
SDS011 / Raspberry Pi pollution monitor project board located in the basement of the house.
My pollution monitor version lives down in the basement crawlspace and is built from a Rasberry Pi communicating to the SDS011 particulate sensor – along with a DHT22 humidity sensor.
The SDS011 is in the lower left hand corner of the project board. The DHT22 is in the little plastic bottle that is part of the plumbing on the lower right of the project board. Of course, the Raspberry Pi is the upper half of the project board.
