October 17, 2019 – Automating and streamlining manual financial processes can pay huge dividends for nonprofit organizations looking to spend more time focused on achieving mission success. To that end, Virginia-based nonprofit, Atlas Network, has leveraged Sage Intacct to modernize its accounting function and gain several financial process improvements. Sage Intacct enabled the nonprofit global advocacy organization to cut its financial close time in half and speed up its reporting processes by 75%, gaining actionable insights in minutes versus two days with its previous system. Connecting Sage Intacct with Salesforce has also improved invoice processing by eliminating duplicate data entry between the accounting and CRM systems.
Atlas Network partners with more than 475 think tanks and activist organizations in over 90 countries to advance the vision of a free and prosperous world in which people can innovate and thrive without barriers.
Prior to Sage Intacct, Atlas Network struggled with tracking and managing their organizational financials and external grants to partners around the world. Using QuickBooks, reporting and budgeting were complex, time-consuming, prone to breakage, and involved a massive spreadsheet that had 20 tabs, each with up to 150 rows and 90 columns of data. In addition, the software didn’t integrate with other critical business applications at Atlas Network, including its Salesforce CRM application used for donor and project management. That meant inefficient duplicate data entry, inconsistent information, and limited visibility for executives and managers.
Since selecting Sage Intacct in 2017, new accounting process efficiencies are freeing more time for reporting and other value-add strategic work and it’s also far easier to manage restricted grants with Sage Intacct. Atlas Network’s finance team is running faster and smarter, and better supporting the organization’s mission of global liberty. “I’m doing more robust financial reporting and I’m doing it faster with Sage Intacct,” says Romulo Lopez, Director of Finance at Atlas Network.
After implementing Sage Intacct, Atlas Network’s finance team realized significant benefits, including:
- Seamless integration with Salesforce CRM: Connecting Salesforce and Sage Intacct improved invoice processing efficiency by 50%, eliminating duplicate entry of invoices and other financial information across two systems. This led to fewer discrepancies for accountants and operational managers to resolve. Additionally, the finance team no longer has to do monthly reconciliations between what was in Salesforce and the information in QuickBooks.
- Highly efficient reporting processes: Timely, accurate data has enabled a 75% leap in reporting efficiencies, providing on-demand reporting answer for managers in minutes, rather than allocating two days to dig up information from QuickBooks and Excel and then product those reports.
- Reduced monthly close: An integration between Sage Intacct and Expensify contributed to a reduction in the monthly close from more than two weeks to as few as five days. Previously, employee credit card transactions would be downloaded from Atlas Network's bank to QuickBooks, and details would need to be manually added. Lopez’s three-person team spent a lot of time making inquiries with credit card users.
Lopez specifically praised the Sage Intacct and Expensify integration, noting: “By automating the expense management process, we have expense reports once they’ve been approved with all information embedded and they flow directly into Sage Intacct,” Lopez said. “That's been a huge time saver." Lopez expects a significant reduction in budgeting time and effort when the organization does its first full annual budget through the system in the second half of 2019.
For more information on how Atlas Network uses Sage Intacct, view the full case study.