Tell me what you want — not how to implement it

I recently wrapped up a big project for a small nonprofit, cleaning up five years of tangled financial records and completely rebuilding their Chart of Accounts (COA), the foundation that underpins how every transaction is categorized, summarized, and eventually reported in statement of account reports, tax returns, and grant applications.

There were 60 months of reconciliations, hundreds of misclassified transactions, plus an existing COA that tried to capture every conceivable scenario, including several that never happened and probably never will. Needlessly long account numbers and names created clutter that inevitably led to data entry errors. Working through the five years of transactions, with some coded to deleted accounts or expenses coded to income accounts, I saw clearly how these books became so bungled. But the real lesson had nothing to do with accounting. It came from a series of emails that perfectly illustrate a common challenge in small organizations (and really, in any collaborative project): people skip over “tell me what you want,” and jump straight into “here’s how I think you should do it.”

The outcome vs. the structure

In this case, my client was very concerned that fundraising event expenses should appear right under fundraising revenues — because that’s how they show up on the IRS Form 990, and that’s how she likes to see it in reports. Perfectly reasonable.

But she proposed implementing this by literally placing expense accounts inside the Revenue section of the Chart of Accounts. In accounting terms, that’s like keeping socks in the refrigerator because you like to put them on right after you pour your milk in your cereal.

It might seem like a clever shortcut, but it fundamentally breaks the system. It violates basic accounting principles (GAAP) and makes audit trails and tax filings a nightmare — all for the sake of a particular display that could be accomplished in seconds with a well-designed report.

Why this matters everywhere

Whether it’s nonprofit finance, database design, or a website redesign, the lesson is the same:

Tell your expert what you want to see, not how to build it.

Say: “I want to see event revenues and expenses together so we can easily understand net results.”

Not: “Put expenses under revenue in the COA.”

Say: “I’d like a dashboard where I can compare last year’s donor campaign to this year’s by month.”

Not: “Build three extra spreadsheet columns in a way that breaks the automated formulas.”

When you skip straight to prescribing how something should be implemented, you risk undermining the integrity of the system itself — and ironically, making it harder to get exactly what you wanted.

The trust factor

Ultimately, this is about trust. If you’ve hired someone with deep expertise, tell them what you want. Describe the end goal, the problem, the clarity you’re hoping for. Then let them figure out how to do it — in a way that maintains standards, sustainability, and flexibility.

Because if they’re good at what they do, they’ll give you both the outcome you asked for and a system that won’t collapse the first time you try to run next year’s reports.