“One of the things that I value most is that Bookminders has enough resources to ensure that that we won’t have to deal with the upheaval of turnover again.”

                                                      -- Janis Risch, Executive Director, Good Schools Pennsylvania

When Janis Risch was appointed Executive Director of Good Schools Pennsylvania, she was both motivated and overwhelmed with the challenge of quickly acclimating herself to the complexities of the organization.

“Bookminders was very helpful to me as a new Executive Director,” she recalls.  “I inherited a chart of accounts that didn’t really work for me, and Bookminders quickly reorganized it in the way that I wanted to see it.”

Founded in 2001, Good Schools Pennsylvania is a statewide nonprofit advocacy group working to inform and mobilize citizens in support of public education.   With multiple offices throughout the state, outsourcing their accounting function made sense from the beginning, but finding the right partner was important.

“We initially outsourced with a small sole proprietor, and when she had a transition in her life and needed to resign it created a minor upheaval as we searched for her replacement,” explains Risch.

“One of the things that I value most is that Bookminders has enough resources to ensure that that we won’t have to deal with the upheaval of turnover again,” she says.  It’s an advantage that was recently put to the test when Good Schools’ regular bookminder decided not to return to work after maternity leave.  “It wasn’t my personnel headache, it was Bookminders’,” Risch notes.  “In the mean time, their senior staff worked overtime to continue doing my books.”

“The bottom line for me is that unless your organization requires full-time bookkeeping, I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to outsource,” she says.

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