Dear Members of AADB,
First, please forgive me for the length of this report, but it is time
to explain everything that has happened in the past week. I am asking
all of you to help spread the word of this report.
Everyone that assisted in the office has arrived home safely. And all
I can say is “WOW!" What a week! The team, who worked with the
group that came to assist us was awesome! I would like to express my heartfelt thank you to all of these people because we would not have been able to accomplish as much as we did without their much needed help.
The people that were in the office were: Lynn Jansen, Mike Reese,
Chris Woodfill, Elizabeth Spiers, Heather Grizzle, Blaise
Delahoussaye, Ulf Hedberg, Sue Clark, Leslie Foxman, Beth Rogers, Pat
Richey, Mindy Frankel, and Becky Hall. I also want to thank Howard
Rosenblum from NAD for his legal advising and offering his help with
AADB in between all of his travels.
I also want to clarify that AADB DID NOT pay for any of us to go into
the office and tackle such a huge job. We paid for our own travel
expenses, such as airfare, hotels, transportation and food. Off of
the top of my head I would say that I had spent about $1000, Lynn
spent $1000, plus others paid on their own. This was a huge hit in all
of our pocketbooks so soon after the Symposium but it is well worth
the expenses because AADB is important to us.
We all had literally cleaned, scrubbed and sorted thru a lot of
paperwork, files and piles that were scattered throughout the five
rooms in the AADB Office. We found money, checks, unpaid invoices,
paid bills with check stubs, etc. plus confidential information that
needed to be paid for, entered into QuickBooks, filed and locked up.
Now that these rooms are cleaned up, when you walk into the office is
a nice large spacious area with three offices with windows. To the
side of the spacious room, there is what we call the conference room
(the fifth room with its own door to get in and out of the hallway
connected to the elevator). The room that AADB intends to keep is the
conference room and the other four rooms have been completely empty of
all the piled papers and “cleared” out. The carpet has been cleaned
and is set to go to be subleased.
The combination of rent, telephone, Internet service, and copier is
$3000 a month and we plan to sublease the office. We are tied to the
lease to rent the office until April of 2013. Carol (the landlord) and
Howard Rosenblum will be assisting in advertising and finding brokers
to help us with this endeavor. With the four rooms, we did put AADB
furniture in these rooms but they will still belong to AADB, the idea
of this is hopefully if someone subleases, they will rent the
furniture.
We have a copier machine that copy, fax and print which are also tied
to a lease agreement and this does not end until January 2012. We
called the company, explained our situation and they were “forgiving”
for the late payments that have been due since December of last year
up to the current month.
This is being paid for and will be paid in full as of this July. We
plan on calling the company back to see if we can negotiate and get
this out of the office. We were told that when the lease ended that we
would own this. No, we discovered this is not true, we will not own
this. Or if we find someone to sublease the office, we are hoping that
they will also want to rent this machine.
We had also called the phone company which is Verizon; we had talked
of canceling this telephone and Internet services because the bill is
about $150/month. This was also behind in several payments and we just
paid $580 so this is now paid in full. We decided to keep this
service for a couple more months until we decide what to do with the
office. (We have every intention on traveling back and forth to the
office).
We were able to find other unpaid bills and have them waived the late
fees. We also cancelled and closed all the accounts that are no
longer needed / to inform them we no longer needed their services such
as Jamie’s credit card, the hired CPA to clean up QuickBooks, and
State of MD (to inform them we no longer have any paid staff).
This past week, an accountant, Becky, was referred to us and what a
great help she has been! The program QuickBooks is the accounting
system AADB is currently using. Due to her low vision, Lynn could not
view QuickBooks without Zoomtext on it so hence is why we brought
Becky in. Becky was a Controller for an Interpreting Firm so she
knows and understands a lot of our endeavors. After cleaning up the
office and putting all the papers into piles into different
categories, Lynn and Becky looked over all of these to see what has
been entered / not entered into QuickBooks. There is a big stack full
of deposit slips that were put into one pile and all of these will
need to be entered by each line items. We are going through all the
paperwork we found laying around in the office to be sure everything
is entered by comparing these to the bank statements since December of
last year. Once we find they are all already entered / need to enter,
we will then file them away in their proper places. We plan on
rearranging the filing system in more organizational way so these can
be easily found for whenever we are looking for these in the future.
We could not find and are still looking for the A/R (Account
Receivable) and A/P (Account Payable) files for the past two years but
we are determined to find these. (They have to be somewhere!) We plan
on going back into the office in a few weeks so we can continue to
completely clean up everything related to bookkeeping. Once this is
completed, we will then be able to share the 1st and 2nd Quarter’s
Reports of this year.
Speaking of the above, to file an IRS’ 990 Form was extended and this
is now due on August 15th. The CPA Firm is still waiting for one
more items from the AADB Office in order to complete the 990 Form and
auditor’s report for the year 2010. We contacted them to find out
exactly what was needed and sent the info therefore these reports
should be completed soon.
Next on hand are we found boxes and files of membership dues forms.
We will need to tackle this project so all the necessary info is put
into one updated files and then we will be able to shred all the
forms. We will then be able to free up some spaces in the “conference
room” of the office.
We do have a lot of work to do! This will take some time to get
everything organized so AADB can move forward and get ahead. We are
determined to run AADB most effectively and efficiently as possible so
we can for now on give good reports to all the members of AADB.
Now that we have several new board members, we are in the middle of
making up a list of committees and I am reassigning chair / co-chair
for each committees. Some of them are By-laws, P&P, Media, Office,
Fundraising, Finance, Symposium, FCC, SSP Services, and many more.
Because this means we will need to do some research as well as
reorganizing all the committees, we are determined to be resourceful
for the sakes of all the members. If you would like to help out in
any way you can, please let us know which committees you would like to
be involved with and I will forward your name to the right chair
person.
Thanks for your support and for taking the time to read this very long
message. I am sure I missed a lot of info here but this is what I can
recall from the top of my head that I could think of for now. If you
have any questions, please feel free to contact me or any of the
others on the board. Because I have a lot of work to do with very
little time on hand and although I would love to read each and every
one of your messages, I will not be able to read everything on the
AADB-L and other list servs. At this time, I can either read all the
email messages or work on very important projects. For now I chose to
work on projects on hand to stay focused on these. I sincerely hope
you understand my circumstances but I will ask a board member or two
to please forward any messages that is directed to me so I can
corresponds with the person.
Forever Yours,
Jill
--
Jill Gaus and Asher
AADB President
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