ATLANTA – Sept. 20, 2018 – Sage (FTSE: SGE), the market leader in cloud business management solutions, today announced that Room to Read has used Sage Intacct, a solution available in Sage Business Cloud, to increase organizational and operational efficiency, impact, and credibility. The global nonprofit estimates the software paid for itself in less than six months.
Room to Read is transforming the lives of millions of children around the world by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. Founded in 2000 on the belief that World Change Starts with Educated Children®, its innovative model focuses on deep, systemic transformation within schools in low-income communities during two time periods that are most critical in a child’s schooling: early primary school for literacy acquisition and secondary school for girls’ education.
Why Sage Intacct?
Room to Read has helped more than 16.6 million children, expanded its programs in 16 countries, and reached $50 million in annual contributions. To support this growth, the organization decided to replace its server-based general ledger system with Sage Intacct, a modern financial infrastructure that could better support its global staff and increased financial needs.
“At Room to Read, we are obsessed with measuring program outputs, such as the number of children’s books distributed and checked out from our libraries, the number of teachers and librarians we’ve trained, and the number of children benefitted. However, our financial information simply wasn’t granular enough to add meaningful insights like cost per activity or investment per child,” said Shari Freedman, CFO, Room to Read. “After comparing Sage Intacct with other products, our corporate and field teams all agreed that it was intuitive, dynamic, and flexible enough to capture all of our operational complexities. What made the decision especially easy was the company’s ‘customer for life’ philosophy, which assured us that Sage Intacct could effectively carry us into the future.”
Room to Read worked with Armanino to implement Sage Intacct, realizing significant benefits, including:
- Streamlined processes to enhance global productivity: Room to Read has reduced its chart of accounts from 56,000 to 100 accounts, eliminated hours of manual, duplicate data entry, and improved productivity by 25 to 30 percent for both worldwide field operations and global finance teams.
- Faster consolidations to allow for forward-thinking analysis: Productivity improvements made consolidations across the organization’s 25 entities and 19 currencies much simpler, significantly reducing the time needed to close books and freeing up teams for value-added analysis.
- Heightened program visibility for increased donor confidence: Drill down capabilities improved analysis of program costs and provided more specific and strategic insights in proposals and reports, increasing donor confidence.
“When a large federal or corporate donor funds a multi-year literacy program across multiple schools, we can accurately report back the specific cost associated with each programmatic component, as well as the program’s impact to date, which increases our credibility and accountability as an organization. We would not have been able to do any of this without Sage Intacct,” shared Freedman.
For more information on how Room to Read uses Sage Intacct, view the full case study. To learn about how Sage Intacct supports all types of nonprofit organizations, visit www.sageintacct.com/financial-management-industries/nonprofit-accounting-software.