Finance advisory flags accounting software failures, recommends forensic review and vendor fixes before new purchases

The town's Finance Advisory presenter told the select board that multiple departmental accounts have exceeded their approved budgets and that the town's recently purchased financial software (referred to in the meeting as BSNA/DSNA) was implemented without needed structure, leaving the system unable to reliably track revenues and some expenditures.

The presenter described examples at the account level: some maintenance lines had a $0 budget but recorded roughly $14,000 in charges; overtime lines and certain custodial and telephone/Internet accounts were also running high. On the software, the presenter said "there's really no functionality for accounts receivable, cash receipts in the existing version we have," and reported that attempts to move or reclassify accounts could cause incorrect postings because the underlying data structures were set up improperly.

Board members and staff discussed options. Interim town administrator Jack Wozmack and others said the town needs a forensic review of prior years' entries to determine where money should have posted and to correct account balances. The finance presenter recommended pressing the vendor to correct the data-structure errors before purchasing front-end modules. The board discussed a possible short-term approach using a municipal QuickBooks configuration to allow manual corrections and an exportable dataset while investigating a longer-term enterprise solution. Meeting participants also cited prior invoices and implementation costs for the current system; a figure of about $80,000 for the initial purchase was referenced during the discussion.

Members agreed to take the finance presenter's report as an initial review, to task staff with following up with the software vendor about required fixes, and to prepare options and cost estimates — including a forensic-entry estimate — for the next meeting.