Brought In to Clean Up a Mess
Alisha O'Connor, External Accountant at OC Accounting, came on as the external accountant for the National Association of Workforce Boards (NAWB) after the organization let go of its previous accounting team. "There were just a lot of things that needed to kind of be taken care of and cleaned up," she says. She wasn't there when NAWB implemented MemberSuite, and for her first couple of months on the account, she didn't even know the system had real accounting capability, because nobody had told her.
The Challenge: A System Nobody Had Actually Set Up
NAWB's previous bookkeepers had resisted integrating with MemberSuite's accounting functionality entirely. Instead, they pulled some data out and kept tracking deferred revenue manually in a spreadsheet, duplicating work the system was already built to handle.
"They didn't do any of the implementation on the accounting side. They wanted to do it the old manual way."
Alisha spent her first month or two doing exactly that: closing the books manually, unaware anything else was possible, until her first real training session with MemberSuite's implementation specialist, Marny.
"She tried to train me and I was like; I have no idea what you're talking about. This is not how the system's set up at all. That's when we realized that's because they didn't do any of the implementation on the accounting side."
The Cleanup
Once she understood what MemberSuite could do, Alisha didn't just turn features on, she rebuilt the books from the ground up to match it. That meant a full cleanup of accounts payable and accounts receivable, reconciling everything against MemberSuite's own numbers, which she trusted because the membership side (managed by her counterpart, Connie) had already been scrubbed clean.
"I had to do a whole system wipe, not just more, a whole cleanup... I needed to match them so that I can start using the incredible functions that MemberSuite does to make my life a thousand times easier."
The cleanup surfaced a real problem the old manual process had been quietly hiding: roughly $300,000 sitting unreconciled in the organization's credit card processing system, money that had never made it into the bank account, and nobody had noticed until someone asked why the balance looked low.
"We didn't realize it until somebody else was like, hey, why is our bank account so low?"
Marny's response became the turning point for how NAWB operates today: once Alisha started reconciling regularly, that kind of gap would surface immediately instead of sitting unnoticed for months.
What Changed: From Monthly Guesswork to Weekly Certainty
Alisha now posts and reconciles batches on a weekly basis, even though NAWB's formal close remains monthly. That weekly discipline is what makes the month-end close painless.
"It makes my life easier to do month-end close by having done it throughout the month, because everything's already recorded and done. So the month-end close process is so much easier."
The logic is simple: a discrepancy is far easier to find in one week's worth of transactions than in thirty days' worth.
"If a week passes and there's just one thing that's missing... it's a lot easier to find where the issue was than a whole month's worth of data."
The QuickBooks Integration
NAWB runs its accounting through QuickBooks, fully integrated with MemberSuite. Alisha downloads a batch file and uploads it directly, and journal entries populate automatically, with no manual re-entry.
"It's completely integrated into QuickBooks now... I just drop the file, and it uploads it and all my journal entries are there. I just match them up."
Before the integration was properly used, NAWB's previous team had been tracking individual memberships manually inside QuickBooks in addition to MemberSuite, pure duplicate work Alisha eliminated entirely once she took over.
"They used to keep track of individual memberships by individual person in the QuickBooks system... I was like, why? That's just redundant."
The Time Savings
Once the initial cleanup period ended, the ongoing time commitment dropped dramatically. Alisha estimates the MemberSuite side of her monthly close now takes somewhere between one and two hours total, and closer to 20 minutes when she's able to stay current week.
"I don't even think it's like 2 hours a month. I mean, if I do it weekly, I'm spending 20 minutes."
Trusting the Numbers
For an accountant, the real test isn't convenience, it's whether the numbers can be trusted without double-checking everything by hand. On that question, Alisha doesn't hesitate.
"The numbers coming out of MemberSuite, they tie with my bank. Everything ties, so it's wonderful."
A Test of Loyalty
The clearest signal of how NAWB's finance team feels about MemberSuite came when a new CEO floated the idea of moving away from it to cut costs. Both Alisha and Connie pushed back immediately.
"We were like, no, nope, we don't care what it costs. We absolutely love it. It makes both of our jobs so much easier."
Alisha's Advice to Other Association Finance Teams
Asked what she'd tell another association's controller, finance director, or accountant considering MemberSuite, Alisha doesn't soften it.
"I would highly recommend MemberSuite, and I would tell them it's made my life a thousand times easier. It's a little bit like any kind of software: when you're implementing it, there's going to be some issues in the beginning. But it's so worth it, because you put in that time and effort to get it right, and then later you can spend hardly any time on it, because everything is integrated so well."
Her advice specifically for QuickBooks users is unambiguous:
"If you have an association management software and you have QuickBooks, get MemberSuite, because they're going to tie together so beautifully, so easily."
