The gardens are for growing vegetables and herbs used by the participating neighbors. If there is an abundance they often setup a simple stand nearby to resell their produce.

Your activities to date have been talking to interested neighborhoods and if interest is there helping locate a plot of land, training individuals on gardening, such as where to get seed and plants, which grow best, tending and harvesting.

You have talked about more creative things, such as bulk purchases of seed and plants, encouraging formalized city wide farmer's markets and a newsletter. Or maybe a web site. Because of your goals your group thinks it is time to form a more formal, business like, organization as either a cooperative or not-for-profit business. It also appears it will be necessary to charge a fee or find some source of revenue, which the group realizes will mean a more business like structure.

At your last meeting the 9 of you decided to be the board and you need officers. After some discussion, a vote takes place. You, Scott, will be president, Norma, vice-president, Howard secretary and Julie the treasurer. All 9 are voting board members. As you are all volunteers and the new 'business' has no much money, you each put up $50 of your own money to 'seed the 'business'.

You plan on charging the neighborhood garden groups a fee to be part of your organization and as the treasury grows the 9 of you will be repaid your $50 'seeding'.

Someone suggested you need some computer capability to handle the accounting. Maybe publish a monthly or quarterly newsletter. Someone else thought a a web site would be better than a newsletter to keep the various member neighborhoods informed and of course to 'sell' the idea to other surrounding neighborhoods.

Soooo. Where to start? Bill said they have computers at the grocery store he works in so maybe he should be the IT person. When questioned about what type of software they would need he admitted that he isn't the one that uses the computers. Others admit to having a computer in the house but they mainly use it for email, news, entertainment and making the annual Christmas letter.. No one admitted to looking at online porn.

Someone floated the idea to go to the computer store on 4th street and ask what they needed.

Three members, Scott, the president, Linda, the new treasurer, and Howard, the secretary, met the store owner on 4th street and told them about their new venture. The owner admitted he had racks of business software but thought it best they talk to several computer software types. People with some real first hand experience of what would help them based on their vision of how the business would run.

The first person they talked to recommended Microsoft 365 which would give them 'cloud computing'. She made that suggestion because there was no central office and the group could do their work online from their houses. She recommended the $22/month option as giving them the most bang. And she was the local expert on setting up and training people on 365. Sounded good.

The next person they talked to recommended using Intuit QuickBooks because that would give them online accounting capability with really neat reporting features. They would always know where their business stood financially. Besides, he was available to help them get the program up and running and for $250 would give them 5 hours of instruction on running. The treasurer said she's seen the TV ads for QuickBooks and the store owner is always smiling while looking at the reports. Obviously a great program and will keep the business running smoothly.

They thought they might try a 3rd person just for grins and found a woman that has been helping people with ACT Customer Relations Management software for the past 25 years. She sells, trains and takes care of problems people have with ACT and would love to help. She sold the 3 of them on the capability of keeping their neighborhood 'customers' informed of new programs and notices of the best time to plant onions and radishes. She said the standard cloud version at $30/month should be fine for them to start. Sounds good.

As you are the president of the organization you are continually talking to people. You happened to run into a guy named Richard at one of the neighborhood meetings. He said he was an independent custom software developer. You weren't quite sure what that meant but you excitedly told him about your organization was very shortly getting into cloud computing even though you are very new and small. You did admit that 4 of you had gone to the web sites of the 3 products you are contemplating using and weren't quite sure what all of the gibberish meant, but the 3 consultants you talked to said they would help you.

When asked what the monthly fees were going to be you said you didn't know. So you dug out your notes: MS 365 $22/month, QuickBooks $40/month and ACT $30/month. Hmm. Less than $100/month. At that rate you realize it might be some time before we get our $50 'seed money' back.

Richard told you to recheck. With 9 users of MS 365 at $22/user/month, that alone is $198/month. 9 users of ACT at $30/user/momth is $270 and when you add in QuickBooks at $40 your up to $508/month. You noticed how Richard stressed the word 'user'. You didn't realize that when talking to the consultant. You suddenly think that you can back up to only 3 users for ACT but we all need MS 365 to create letters. That takes it down to about $328/month. You know you have some phone calls to make to the other 8 board members about this.

Richard also suggested you find out what the experts on these 3 different programs were going to charge for their help setting up/training/future problem solving. You make a mental note of that as something to talk to the board about.

Richard mentions to you something you hadn't considered: none of these 3 programs talk to each other. They are independent of each other. He also said that if in the future you decide to quit using or fail to make a payment on time you might lose all of your data. MicroSoft clearly states your data is deleted when you quit. The same will probably be true for ACT and QuickBooks. Also they are generally auto-renewing which means they need a credit card on file for renewal time. Which of the 9 of you will put up their credit card.

Richard also said that he never heard about your planned web site. Where will that be hosted? How much is that going to cost up front and monthly?

At this point you ask Richard if you scheduled a full board meeting would he attend to talk to them and see if there might be some less expensive options. Maybe something that tied all components together. Richard said sure. Just schedule something and he'd make himself available. No charge.