Re: Agenda item for February SPI board meeting

On Sun, 5 Feb 2012, Jonathan McDowell wrote:

> I have added this, but the previous approach has been that such
> discussion should take place on the lists beforehand, rather than a new,
> free ranging discussion being begun at the meeting itself.

Hi Jonathan. I don't envision the discussion at the board meeting would
be terribly in depth. Id just like to gauge the general feeling of the
other board members.

> My main concern is that we lack definition of "back office support".

I deliberately left this a bit vague at this stage.

> What tasks do we expect this new resource to carry out? You say:

Well areas that I had in mind include:

* Fulfilling any state & federal annual filing requirements

* Processing reimbursement requests so that the treasurer just needs to
authorise them

* Data entry, such as entering reimbursement requests to the accounting
software

In my experience these are time consuming tasks that can be readily handed
off to an assistant.

The very nature of ad hoc reimbursement requests makes them difficult to
automate.

> but I haven't seen anything from Michael stating areas he would like
> help with, nor have I encountered any areas myself that I think would be
> greatly aided by another pair of hands.

Well the purpose of this was to raise the discussion. It may be that this
is not the right way to allow SPI to scale.

I plan to work on a DR/BCP plan for SPI which will involve me
understanding those processes but I haven't got there yet.

> I'm not saying this because I'm against the idea, I just think that we'd
> need to have at least a rough set of defined tasks that we think are
> pain points now (or will become so as we grow) that help would be useful
> with.

Yes fair enough. If there is general support for the idea we can hash it
out further.

I understand an alternative suggestion that has been raised is to retain
the services of a bookkeeper. We can discuss this briefly in the same
agenda item.

Cheers,

Rob

--
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