The Progress Notes are being submitted by the Office Manager and the participating Board members so that the fellowship is apprised of the Staff and Board's ongoing effort to effectively and efficiently discharge their duty to serve the fellowship by carrying the message to the adult child that suffers.
Progress Notes
May 23, 2013
Opened with Serenity Prayer at 3pm EST
OLD BUSINESS
Donate the Van. Staff and Office Manager a couple of minutes have gone into researching possible organizations
FedEx Resolved, no further contacts.
Tri-folds pre-counted - Office Manager to check cost of presorted mulit-colored assortment to compare to our cost in labor.
Extra UPS Account - Webmaster and UPS staff looked into this and set up all the accounts so they are all on line.
Price Points: Webmaster & UPS Staff (& office)- researched/compared pricing points four ways, over UPS.com (retail rates) to UPS Worldship (where we process UPS orders & contains our negotiated, less-than-posted-retail rates to Go Daddy QSC to our contract w/UPS. We all determined that the price points were all set up correctly post-reinstallation of Worldship & THub (necessitated by our hard drive crash & subsequent replacement) & determined appropriate system flags in place such that the negotiated rates we see match the negotiated rates in our UPS contract. Apparent discrepancies that the office staff & Webmaster had observed were explained or cleared.
UPS Billing- outstanding UPS Mail Innovations invoices (for UPS International shipments): As Accountant had set up electronic billing for our UPS account, we were all surprised to find that there were outstanding invoices we owed to UPS- why? how? what? We learned with assistance from our UPS account rep that UPS has separate billing for the UPS Mail Innovations line of business (International shipments). My understanding at this point is that Accountant/Mary Jo were going to set up that UPS line of business for electronic billing as well. Additionally, our UPS rep/Rebecca is setting up a time for the Mail Innovations rep/Kyle to come to the office to explain how the billing for our UPS international works- we in the office have questions relating to how to tie the individual order to the two sets of tracking numbers on the Internationals to the actual billing we receive- such that Accountant knows for what orders she is paying on each specific invoice. In this way, we would be able to tie back to the original QSC order, all the way through inception through billing.
New order of books - Bang has provided estimates for 6,000 books; working on 7,000 and 8,000 books estimates- asking for these additional quotes is not going to delay processing of this order. Need to know per unit cost to see if larger or smaller orders are more affordable.
Letter to UK and Australian Intergroups for seeding project orders Staff has contacted one intergroup and is going to contact the other.
Rewarehousing: Thoughts on time to do "rewarehousing". They are still looking at what will fit where, but Office Manager thinks it may take 6-8 person hours.
- 20 hours per week fewer hours - Man hours for warehouse and office staff down from 109 to about 89Office Manager and Gloria).
Staff's departure -Staff to get a date certain in the next couple of days for a physical, then she will get a date.
Percentage of damage to books that necessitated bubble wrapping - Pilot project started Tuesday and running it for 25 cases or 1 week whichever occurs last to get a good sample for feedback on potential book damage.
Donated file cabinets - No keys; Staff to order keys.
Asking the ACA meeting to move: Office Manager and Staff wrote letter and it is being sent today, as well as calling them and posting the letter on the meeting room door.
New meeting packets are still being fully assembled by hand. Talked about sending unassembled, but not initiated yet. Staff to generate an instruction sheet for Treasurer to review. Will either put unassembled materials in front and back inside pockets, or in a separate envelope.
Weight Stress Belts - staff have their own. Two spare belts will be bought for volunteers
UPS Solutions periodically does analysis to tell us where our obvious savings will be. It would be interesting to know what the number of orders we need to send to a given area for them to get a discount so we might target them for Outreach efforts.
NEW BUSINESS
Seeding project UK shipment was delayed. Covered. Planning for next Seeding Project shipment to be more timely by giving them advance notice of the next printing cycle. Staff to contact Chair for particulars of how much the intergroups have to pay upfront while limiting ACA WSO exposure.
Volunteers - Office Manager has emailed a member their hours but hasn't heard back. Office Manager to send member’s e-mail address so Chair can send an appreciative note encouraging them to follow through with their pledge to volunteer. Of two other volunteers that had expressed interest, one was scheduled and didn't show up; the other one hasn't called back.
Order turn around times - The general idea is to determine how long it takes to get an order out the door. It's ok for orders to wait and not go out immediately, although Office Manager feels it takes the same amount of time no matter when an order is done. Office Manager said she's thought of possibly closing the office and warehouse one day a week (Tues. or Thurs.) as a labor saving idea. Chair and Treasurer want more information before brining that forward to the Board. Chair mentioned potential savings of 20 fewer hours worked per week, using an average salary. Payroll last year was just over $120,000. For every 20 hours per week we shave, we save about $17,000. Office Manager said she hasn't had the financial context before and hearing the numbers this way helped put things in better perspective on the need to cut labor costs and keep us in the black.
General conversation flow - to save on emails for the Board, communication about office matters discussed in our weekly meetings will be betweenOffice Manager, Treasurer and Chair. Treasurer and Chair will send notes from the calls to Office Manager to confirm understanding. Treasurer and Chair will then forward all information to the Board to reduce e-mail load and ensure consistent communication among everyone. Any responses or further updatesOffice Manager has are to be funneled through Treasurer and Chair to avoid e-mail overdose.
Pay stubs - there was a computer glitch this week that did not send electronic PDFs of pay stubs to employees. Staff sent emails to Accountant, who indicated that this is outside of our agreement with her and she would have to charge us separately for the work to investigate and fix this problem. When Treasurer received a copy of that note from Accountant on Tuesday, she sent a note that no work should be done by Accountant that will cost extra money unless the Chair and Treasurer are notified first. If the Board approves the charges, then this will be communicated to Accountant.
Closed with Serenity Prayer at 4:35 pm EST
