You Can Do Anything—Lori Sandoval's Story

My name is Lori Sandoval, and I'm the bookkeeper for SOMA USA, [a small non-profit] which is a client of CDM+ and has been for six, seven years or longer. The most important thing to [SOMA], besides the bottom line in the budget, is to keep track of their donations and send thank you notes.

I'm also the bookkeeper for All Saints Church in Woodbridge. Whereas SOMA has five employees and they write 22 checks a month, the church writes 300 checks a month, has a budget of over a million dollars and has 25 employees. It's a much bigger operation.

When the church was looking to change software three years ago, they chose [CDM+] because SOMA had the software. But, SOMA does not use it to the extent of what it can do. They keep it very simple because they're missionaries; they're not financial gurus. I came in and set it up and made it work for them way beyond what they were using. I knew [CDM+] could do anything that the church would want to do. I've always liked it. I like things like Sudoku; I'm very logically minded, and CDM+ makes perfect sense to me.

You have to understand, there's a learning curve of understanding what [CDM+] needs to make it do or report what you want, but once you get that premise, you can go anywhere...you can do anything. So, even though I'm not familiar with Membership, I understand, because of working with Contributions and Accounting, how to get Membership to give me what I want.

And, I know that if there's a report I can imagine, because I understand how CDM+ keeps information, I'm pretty sure I can figure out how to get it. But, I know that if I go through them [the pre-set reports], I'll probably find what I'm looking for. I'm actually interested in . . . how to make reports that aren't on the list [so I'm going to Advanced Reporting today].