Mercy Ships Has Smooth Sailing with OSAS Client/Server

Since 1978, Mercy Ships has been providing medical and dental assistance, agricultural skills, relief services and development services to the world’s poorest countries. The fleet of three ships began as a dream, but has now completed projects in more than 70 port areas around the world. The ships are crewed by doctors, water engineers, teachers, and agriculturists who have been able to provide life-changing services, food, medicines, and skills at no charge. Mercy Ships has performed 8,000 onboard operations, treated more than 200,000 people in village medical clinics, performed 100,000 dental treatments, completed over 250 construction and agriculture projects, and much more.

One of the reasons Mercy Ships has been able to accomplish so much is because career and short-term volunteers raise their own support and pay crew fees to serve. That is just one of Mercy Ship’s unique business requirements that OSAS Client/Server (C/S) was able to handle. OSAS C/S is the high performance, cost-effective client/server version of OPEN SYSTEMS Accounting Software that provides additional platform flexibility and scalability.

Kerry Peterson, president of SR Consulting, is a former staff member for Mercy Ships. His office is based in Lindale, TX, which is also home to Mercy Ship’s main office. After leaving the organization, Peterson left the area for awhile and worked as a programmer and consultant. Upon his return to Lindale, he found that Mercy Ships was experiencing many problems with their accounting software, Flagship. “They were losing transactions in the general ledger and all kinds of things,” says Peterson. “I offered my time to convert them over to a stable product. We thought about going to Windows, but OSAS has some great features – the productivity reports, the ODBC Kit – there’s plenty there to give it Windows functionality, so by no means do I feel like we’re locked out of a Windows environment. We decided to go with OSAS because I had always found it to be a good product. When we did the conversion, we did not run parallel because we didn’t trust the data that was coming out of the old system. Every time we started chasing down why two numbers weren’t the same, it ended up being a failure in the old system. That software got so bad, so unreliable, that we basically converted overnight.”

Peterson wrote a program to take the Flagship data and import it into general ledger transactions, which took him four to five hours. “It was just a couple of days and everyone was pretty much off working on their own stuff, with very few questions,” he says. Peterson then brought in Lillian Aaron of Business Accounting Software to conduct four days of training.

Mercy Ships is currently operating three ships that travel to third world countries serving the poor and needy. In all, there are seven locations using OSAS C/S. They are running a combination of Windows 98 and Windows 2000 clients, with Linux servers. The Texas office has twelve users and the others each have four. Because the ships travel to 17 different countries, Peterson recruited another of his associates, Alex Pearson of IS Systems, to write a multicurrency module.

“Modifying OSAS is pretty straightforward,” says Peterson. “We were able to do it without drastically changing the base product, so we are not going to have huge problems come upgrade time.”

Peterson says there are other pluses to using OSAS C/S. “All of our locations do consolidated reporting. One of the coolest things about OSAS is the ability to do consolidated statements. That’s a huge plus.” And, he says, Mercy Ships has special payroll needs. They take advantage of a unique benefit the IRS gives to not-for-profit organizations called Accountable Reimbursement. Says Peterson, “If one of them drives - say - 100 miles in the course of their job, they can then submit their mileage times the current reimbursement rate and have it deducted from their earnings. It disappears from the gross pay.” By setting it up as a deduction and going through manual checks, Peterson was able to process those and have them show up with an audit trail. “I was thinking we’d have to do custom modifications, so I was thrilled that we didn’t have to,” he says.

Peterson sums up his satisfaction with the software by saying, “For us, the biggest benefit of OSAS C/S is the flexibility we have. Not only the ability to do consolidated reporting, but in all of the accounting software packages I’ve dealt with, your report generator for General Ledger is by far the best I’ve ever seen: hands down, no two ways about it. The software has been very intuitive.”