Customized Options has come a long way in it's journey that started over a decade ago. CO still has challenges like every organization, but they have a very dedicated staff - from their DSPs to the main office - who truly care about the welfare of their clients and will bend over backwards for them.
Beginning in 2012-Mar 2014, I worked first as a volunteer for Customized Options as a grant writer, and then as Treasurer and bookkeeper. I had seen a presentation by Barb at ARC Minnesota yearly convention the year before, and was so impressed with her creativity and energy. She had great ideas for getting work for people with disabilities (esp. autism) and several of her clients had mini-enterprises. So I volunteered my time. At first, when filling out grant applications I could not get budgets and P&L's from the business and found myself at midnight the night before the final date helping her "make up" a budget and P&L from last year's 990. When they asked me if I could serve as Treasurer, and later, financial officer, I jumped at the chance thinking that organizing this area of their business would make it possible for me to be more successful winning a grant.
This shifted to exploring grants for Board improvement as finding Board members was a consistent problem. It seemed to me that Board structure was also a problem. This organization is led by the Executive Director. She has always been one of 3 - 5 Board members and maintained almost total control of the organization. Budgets, plans and other Board functions rarely were discussed and I do not remember any votes on Budgets. There were numerous reasons for not creating budgets. The routine for producing a budget was never clearly outlined and the Treasurer (me) found herself accused of not producing reports that could lead to a budget when reports were regularly produced but results skewed due to the irregularlities of Minnesota State waiver funding policies. So the Treasurer was advised to wait until the billings for the missing service agreements had been done (dependent on receiving the service agreements from the State) so the entries could be made into the software and the financials more correctly reflective of the income.
There were arguments about who was at fault for these problems and the Board seemed to conclude that I was at fault. On the other hand, I am not clear at all what else I should or could have done. On the other hand, I urged them to create a budget based on a report I would make which gave projections for income in 2014. Of course these projections might or might not be correct. But it seemed to me that a budget of some kind should have been written by the Board in November 2013 and updated whenever new information about 2014 income would be available. This was the advice I got from the bookkeeper advising me.
Therefore I remained unsuccessful organizing the financial records. I did file the reports, and I set up an online storage system which made it easy to file receipts, timecards, personnel records, and other financial information.
When I first started, few receipts were being recorded for expenditures. While I worked as financial officer or bookkeeper, I was able to increase the amount of receipts recorded and entered in the software to almost 100%. However in November 2013 the receipts dropped off to almost nothing. The office was no longer faxing me receipts, and I was left to guess from bank records, VISA statements, and some bills that often did not come to me. I made some attempts to get receipts sent to me again but failed.
Closing out books was delayed due to confusion about how to enter work which was done but could not be billed due to missing service agreements due to problems with State Changes late November early December. I asked for guidance but did not get direction until late February and then closed the books early March after most billings had been billed and paid. I could have done it after the first billing (before payments were received) but didn't realize that.
Some of the problems I encountered were:
1) lack of time to talk with me. (I tried to get the E.D. to commit to 45 minutes every two weeks at a time convenient to her but she refused.) So questions I had often remained unanswered and oversight by the director was nonexistent. I was on my own, a complete beginner in the financial world, although I did seek and receive advice from a contracted bookkeeper who was very helpful.
2) constant problems with staff. This happens to organizations who depend on low-paid staff for direct care service, but our staff were extremely low-paid. Our profit margin was quite small and we had problems training and overseeing the almost 50 staff we had with 2 supervisors.
3) director would get into long conversations about misbehaving staff, cute things our clients did, success our staff had, and anything else that was pleasant for us to talk with but would not work in an organized way to communicate with me. At times she would not return my phone calls although this can be attributed to challenges she had with her own son. But it left me on my own.
4) There were times that almost nothing I sent her was dealt with and later found in huge, disorganized piles of paper. Things were late, held up, not dealt with at all at certain points. I am not blaming the director; her plate was definitely overfull.
5) Director structured the organization so she was responsible for almost everything in the organization. As time went on, she did find one trusted employee who was able to take over some of the administration, but it was minimal. At that point, she began taking work away from me and giving it to him rather than using it to organize the business.
6) I had wanted to apply for an infrastructure grant that would help with Board members and Board responsibilities/structure first of all. My biggest concern was that the entire organization was loaded onto the back of one person who was responsible, basically, for everything and who had a son who was subject to life-threatening illnesses and the severe autistic behavior issues. Her income was low, she was a single parent, and the whole thing seemed to be hanging by a thread. Her cousin was the Board Chairman and basically underwrote whatever she directed. The Board consisted of almost always only employees of the organization (admin.) and one very interested parent of a client who finally resigned. So I thought some support from the community would be very important, and the first step would be to get the Board doing its work with an option for a Chairman who was dedicated to the organization rather than mostly to the E.D..
Then the Board could decide to meet (apart from the E.D.'s directions) to create yearly budgets and make decisions independently from the E.D., while still accepting advice from the E.D. This would remove a lot of responsibility from the E.D.
I guess my greatest concern was that the E.D. was not just an Executive Director but had control of the Board as well. There was no dissension, no discussion. At the end, I argued for what I thought the organization needed (yearly budgets, receipts/records of expenditures, and other things that the auditor may well want from us later on) and the focus was placed on the fact that I was late with the closing (on advice of the E.D., but this was not considered) and, since all the work had been removed from my responsibility, I had nothing left but to resign.
There was a small attempt to thank me for hard work (I had put in many hours of unpaid work) but at the end The Board Chairman (the E.D.'s cousin) and the E.D. both appeared very angry at me and have never communicated with me since.
This was personally a very big defeat for me. My accuracy was high, I managed some extremely complex problems successfully, and there was no recognition of this fact. I believe it was a highly complex bookkeeping system and neither the E.D. nor the office manager could understand it. However I was simply following directions from the bookkeeper they hired to direct me who assured me my work was good. In fact, she hired me to do some work for her a couple months later paying twice what I was paid as bookkeeper. (I was paid only $14 / hour.) I gave up a couple years of my own business to do this, because I believed in Customized Options and I believed in this E.D..
It was my mistake to believe I had the power to turn around the lack of organization and the structural problems which are keeping this business from moving forward.
Review from Guidestar