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When David Barth, Director of the Canadian charitable organization World Accord, asked if I would teach QuickBooks to a group of Mayan women in rural Guatemala, my first thought was, “How can I possibly do this?”

A thousand reasons why not flashed through my mind: This is my busiest season; I’m overbooked; I have to take the most recent QuickBooks POS certification exam; and my Spanish is rusty never mind having to use precise business terminology.

So I respectfully declined the engagement.

The next day, I couldn’t stop thinking about these women. I learned that Mujeres en Acción (MeA) (Women in Action) focuses primarily on micro-credit driven enterprise development. MeA serves 900 plus indigenous women in Guatemala many of whom were widowed by the Civil War that only ended in mid 90’s.

That’s when the thought “How can I possibly do this?” changed to “How can I possibly not do this?”

Within two weeks, I was on my way to Guatemala.

At La Aurora airport in Guatemala City, I was surprised to see Señora Felipa Xico, one of the founders of MeA, standing on line with a hand-made placard bearing my name.

Dressed in the traditional Mayan hand-embroidered huipil (blouse) and a blue textile wrap-around corte (skirt), she graciously welcomed me to Guatemala. Her assistant, Julio packed my bags into a 1990 Isuzo Trooper and, after a bumpy hour ride, we arrived at Chimaltenango, a town of about 45,000 people located 34 miles west of Guatemala City.

The MeA center was an unimposing white, two-story building tucked behind an iron security fence. My room was sparely but comfortable furnished: two beds, a large wooden chest, a plastic table, a wooden chair and some shelving. I settled in and rested before dinner.

Manic Monday

I was up early to prepare for my class. Because the center had no formal kitchen—no stove, no sink, certainly no dishwasher, all cooking was done on a hot plate or outside on a two foot by one foot grill heated by mesquite wood. Breakfast was ham omelets with tortillas and black beans. Macaria, a sweet, diminutive woman hovered over me pouring me cup after cup of a delicious cinnamon tea. I learned that before leaving the table, it was customary to say “Muchas Gracias,” instead of “Excuse me.”

After breakfast, I also learned that the original troubleshooting and training engagement for two to three people had become a formal class for eight to nine. Amilcar and Juanita who ran the Programa de Reconstrucción Rural (PRR) were coming in from Honduras.

We scrambled to assemble a classroom in the main assembly hall. There was a white board, lunch-room tables, three computers and an old, dim InFocus projection device.

But nine people? I had no class outline, no formal plan for a class, and hours of searching the Internet had yielded surprising little in the way of QuickBooks training materials in Spanish.

Panic started setting in—what had I gotten myself into?

In short order, the class assembled and I was gazing into eyes of nine people who were expecting a formal class. So I wrote my name on the white board plunged into my semi-prepared opening speech: “Please excuse my rusty Spanish; I am going to ask for your help in translating some of the technical accounting terms First of all I understand that someone was here last year to set up in QuickBooks, I need to know why it didn’t happen.”

I learned that the person who had made the attempt had taught the theory of how to use QuickBooks but had not used their actual data.

“Well, show me how you are doing accounting now, “I said, thinking I could buy more time before a formal presentation.

I learned that MeA did everything in Excel in an extensive, multi-page spreadsheet that summarized to a Balance Sheet and Income Statement.

PRR from Honduras was using a vintage Dos-based program from the 90’s that called for closing out the month before beginning a new one. I also saw that they were using the chart of accounts to departmentalize various projects and also had no real need for entering bills or invoices.

“Well, O.K. I thought to myself, once they see how easy it is to enter transactions through the register, split transactions by class, and to get reports by project, they are going to love QuickBooks!”

So, I plunged in and outlined my plan, “There’s a difficult way to use QB and there’s an easy, we’re going to take the easy way.” Everyone, write this down: Cntrl-R. I then demonstrated how to enter a check and a deposit in the register.

At that moment, Sra. Xico appeared anxious to know how it was going. She didn’t see any formal teaching going on—just a lot of talking. She then dropped the bomb that they were being audited the next month by the agency that demanded that they use QuickBooks or lose their funding.

No pressure. Just when I was starting to feel good about the engagement.

But, Señora, “¡Sí, Se Puede!” (Yes, it can be done.) “¡Sí, Se Puede!” I repeated several times like a fanatic. I later learned that I had appropriated the motto from Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union protest marches during the late 60’s.

Who knew?

But Sra. Xico wanted to know if it would be better to set up separate company file for each donor organization or project.

“Do you keep separate bank accounts for each?” I asked.

“No,” she replied.

“Then we can use classes to track them.” I said. “Rosie, enter a check and distribute it to one of the projects. Now click on Reports, Company & Financial, and Profit & Loss by Class so we can all see what the report looks like.”

“Ahhh,” said the class in unison. Problem solved.

So we set up the two companies: MeA and P.R.R. and spent the rest of the day entering the chart of accounts.

It was a start.

Terrible Tuesday

During the night I found out why my contact from World Accord had advised me to bring ear plugs and a headset. The center was located next to the Bimbo Bread Factory. All throughout the night, an unrelenting stream of noisy diesel rigs drove in and out.

The next morning at breakfast I translated the word Bimbo, “una rubia estupida.” This lead into a conversation about priceless errors committed when translating slogans or names of products from one language to another such as Chevrolet’s failed marketing attempt to bring the Chevrolet Nova into Latin America.

Why did it fail?

It failed because Nova is exactly what you say when you have a car problem: “Mi coche no va.” My car doesn’t run.

My translation of account types didn’t work either. Both sets of students had finished entering their Chart of Accounts on Monday, and we were ready to enter the Beginning Balance Journal Entry.

Both companies had several “Cuentas por Cobra” – Accounts Receivable and several “Cuentas por Pagar” – Accounts Payable accounts. This is fine until you start entering a journal entry with multiple AR account lines—remember only one permitted per journal entry.

Darn! What to do? Would they have often have journal entries with multiple AR and AP distributions? Yes.

Solution?

I exported the Chart of Accounts to Excel and changed the Accounts Receivable account types to Other Current Assets and the Accounts Payable account type to Other Current Liabilities and imported the revised list.

Onward and upward. By lunch my students had finished entering Beginning Balances. ¡Sí, Se Puede!

After a great lunch of barbecued chicken, salad, beans, tortillas which I had come to enjoy more than Bimbo bread, we continued.

I took the moment to emphasis the importance of backing up. In rural Guatemala the power fluctuates and often fails. So we practiced backing up several times to an “USB” micro drive. I reviewed the importance of naming the file distinctly by adding today’s date to the file name. We also summarized how to restore in the simplest of terms “De, “ “A.” From, to.

By late afternoon, everyone was entering the January transactions through the register using split to distribute amounts to the various projects.

Maybe this would work after all.

At dinner that evening, we started talking about movies, and I asked if everyone had seen Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and what they thought of it. Amilcar, the controller from Honduras, started me with his response. He didn’t think it went far enough in the depiction of Christ’s final hours. In other words, it could have been stronger, bloodier and even more violent.

But what did most North Americans think of it?

I said, “It’s ironic that in the country that produces the most graphic films, most main stream North Americans thought that it was too violent.”

This lead into an interesting discussion of faith, religion and destiny that went late into the night.

Wonderful Wednesday

Eggs, tortillas, beans for breakfast. By now I was relaxed enough to joke that there would be an exam at mid-morning. We began the day with a review of all the concepts that we had covered. I asked a lot of open-ended “How do you.. .? “Why do you…? Where do you…? When do you…? questions.

By George, I mean, By Jorge, they were getting it!

January was entered so we turned our attention to Bank Reconciliation, Exporting reports to Excel where the headings could be changed to Spanish, QuickReports, & a review of Backup and Restore.

Grand Finale

Before I left, I did witness some of the community work of Sra. Xico and her dedicated crew. She literally has been kidnapped and threatened because of it, yet still continues to made a dramatic difference in the lives of the women and families she serves.

As I told David Barth of World Accord via Skype, it was my most challenging and satisfying QuickBooks engagement. Would I be up for more in the future?

You bet!

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