Cool Projects

Today I was working on two interesting projects.

One was compiling proposals from audit firms. We have had the same auditor for several years, and our board wanted to go to bid. This Request for Proposals was electronic, now a common practice, creating a .pdf out of the RFP document, emailing it to the audit firms, then having them bid with a .pdf. A couple of the bidders told me it saves them time, too, to do it in this paperless fashion.

I used an email questionnaire to the references - the fastest possible way to get references done, and not my own idea but an idea from a colleague. You write it once, send it to all the references (for whom emails were requested to begin with). Most of them emailed something back in less than 10 minutes, and I have a record of what they said, not what I thought they said. And you're fair, because you asked everyone the same questions.

You could do almost any bid process this way.

The other cool project - that I didn't work on much, merely followed an email discussion, was the Austin CPA chapter's committee to create a free training day for our members, who like me, are controllers. We had a great discussion by email about what classes we want and where to find speakers. It's going to be an excellent program. My one contribution is I'm going to interview a possible speaker on credit and collections in the morning - I want a class on that!