At A Glance
Customer Profile:
This Bay Area nonprofit impacts the lives of nearly 5,000 children and families annually. Replacing spreadsheets with Workday Adaptive Planning has given the organization visibility and control of its budgeting process and program cost accounting, as well as the ability to forecast.
Software & Services
Benefits
For more than 100 years, this San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit has aimed to disrupt the cycle of poverty and trauma through a series of evolving programs, giving children and families the tools to build strong futures. The organization provides children with support and services at as young an age as possible, and makes a continuum of programs available to them from their early school years through high school.
This noble cause is what attracted their chief financial officer (CFO), who joined the organization because he wanted to help them succeed in their mission to serve children and strengthen families.
One of the first orders of business for the new CFO was to institute a far more robust budgeting and forecasting solution. The previous, Excel-based budget process was completely inflexible and made detailed forecasting impossible, leaving the finance team stuck with manual calculations, broken links and wild guesses to plan their cash flow.
Another major challenge that the organization faced was lack of visibility into the true cost, including both direct and indirect costs, for running each of its programs. Their new finance leader aimed to solve that problem, as well.
The new CFO had already successfully deployed Adaptive Insights, a cloud-based planning, reporting and analysis solution, at a previous organization, and he knew that it would be the ideal solution to the nonprofit’s financial planning and reporting challenges. “I knew I didn’t need to look anywhere else,” he says. “When I showed our CEO a demo of Adaptive Insights in my office, [the CEO] was totally convinced.”
Based on his previous success, the CFO turned to the same firm he had used before for the implementation of Adaptive Insights: Armanino LLP. The largest independent accounting and consulting firm based in California, Armanino also has the largest certified Adaptive Insights development and implementation team in the nation. “Armanino has been and continues to be an incredible partner,” he says. “I knew they would be using their knowledge and experience to guide us every step of the way.”
The finance team is thrilled with the results of the Adaptive Insights deployment. “With Adaptive Insights, we can now plan cash flow on a month-by-month basis,” says the CFO. “I can sleep at night because I can accurately predict our cash flow at any given point in time.”
In addition to gaining comprehensive forecasting capabilities, the organization has also benefitted from a significant reduction in the time and effort it takes for the budget process. The CFO estimates that his organization saves at least 120 hours of time for each budget/forecast cycle. The time savings, combined with the powerful analytic capabilities within Adaptive Insights, has allowed the finance leader and his organization to focus more on higher-value activities for the nonprofit. “I am a strategic CFO, and Adaptive Insights helps me and my staff be as strategic as possible,” he says.
He uses the newfound insights from his Adaptive Insights solution to educate the executive staff, finance committee and board on revenue and cash flow. “Our CEO loves having the ability to access the data at any time,” he says. “Personally, I’m hooked on Adaptive Insights. I will never go back to spreadsheets.”
As for visibility into the true cost of each of its programs, the nonprofit now has the necessary capabilities and transparency within Adaptive Insights to:
With the initial deployment behind him, the CFO is pushing forward with new projects. A top priority is expanding the nonprofit’s visibility into real-time data by integrating Adaptive Insights with the organization’s accounting system.
At the end of the day, he feels good about his team’s ability to help the nonprofit achieve its goals using Adaptive Insights. “With Adaptive Insights, I can give the organization the information it needs to fulfill our mission,” he says. “Indirectly, that means that Adaptive Insights helps us reduce truancy, keep youth out of the juvenile justice system, and increase literacy.”
November 06, 2017
