Audacious missions, like improving access to quality education for over 20 million underserved children, require rock-solid process implementation. Room to Read knew they could do more to maximize their impact with an integrated solution. And as many in the nonprofit sector have done, this San Francisco-based organization turned to technology to figure out how.
Their finance team’s challenges echoed other nonprofits around the globe:
- A complex, high-growth, global operation
- Manual expense processing, without a time tracking system
- Insufficient reporting contributing to a lack of actionable data
- Inefficient, weeks-long close processing
Our latest customer success story details how Room to Read overcame each with the help of automation. Here are some highlights from their transformative Nexonia implementation.
“Modern solutions like Nexonia help support our mission and enable us to deliver educational programs to the world’s most vulnerable communities.”
- Shari Freedman, CFO at Room to Read
Uniting global operations With Sage Intacct serving as the point of truth for Finance, integration was key. Freedman’s team was able to sync over 50 bank accounts across the globe, issue reimbursements in 19 local currencies, and streamline the entire expense management process. “The integration between systems works beautifully, and gives us so much time back,” said Freedman.
Un-daunting a manual process “Our manual, Excel-based process was simply not scalable,” Freedman shared. “We were always behind schedule on our close dates and had to constantly chase people for receipts.” Automating the entirety of her small team’s workflow revolutionized a formally daunting process. As a result, everyone had more time to focus on work that positively impacted the nonprofit’s mission.
Delivering insight from reporting Room to Read could easily track internal and donor-funded projects after connecting Nexonia Expenses and Nexonia Timesheets to their Intacct system. The reporting insights gained provided details into the operation that were difficult to gauge before implementation. Freedman explicitly mentions this has been vital to the nonprofit’s success: “Custom reporting allows us to easily track the outcome of our programs in terms of the number of children being impacted, and tie that back to specific donor investments.”
Taking weeks off month-end closing times Nexonia helped Room to Read simplify the audit process. As a bonus, the organization reduced its time-to-close by more than 80%. Freedman explained, “With our manual system, it required several weeks of intense auditing and late nights to resolve our expense reporting. [Now] the process only takes a few days, so we can easily close on time each month without the added stress.”
You can read about the remarkable transformation of Room to Read’s expense management process and employee experience by downloading their customer success story.