NIC went to Intacct Advantage looking for the right answers. What they came back with instead were the right questions. Sound backward? Venn doesn’t think so.
The National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care (NIC) is a nonprofit whose mission is to support access and choice for America’s seniors by providing data and analytics that support the efforts of the investors and providers who serve them.
It was there at Intacct Advantage, listening to conference speaker Scott Hollrah and hearing his incisive questions, that opened NIC’s eyes to what integration could really deliver for them.
According to Leigh Anna Geraghty, NIC’s Manager of Marketing and Sales Technology; at the time they met Hollrah and began their relationship with Venn, they had already been using Salesforce and Intacct for some time. But, the applications were siloed—being used standalone.
NIC believed they should be getting more from their investment in these costly applications and wanted to eliminate the multiple manual steps and unnecessary duplication of records they felt were robbing them of time and resources. Still, they didn’t feel they knew enough to say: this is exactly what we need—what will it cost?
According to Geraghty, Venn took the time to thoroughly evaluate and understand their processes, walk them through the possibilities, lay out the pros and cons, and discuss potential trade-offs.
“What Venn initially did for us changed tedious by-hand processes that took hours into a button-press that delivers answers for us in 30 seconds. However, that was just the beginning. It opened up a new world to us, and from that point forward we wanted everything to happen that fast,” said Geraghty.
Before Venn built out World Learning’s custom integration, the Accounting Team was spending 80-hour weeks trying to log donations manually and keep track of last-second changes that could have major impacts on whether pledges were correctly recorded in the books.
After Venn built out the custom integration, syncing the entire fiscal year’s donations over to Intacct took less than two days across a multi-day, phased launch. Not only did the Accounting Team get to sleep during their audit period, but they were also able to spend more time refining their processes and preparing for the next fiscal year.
According to Mersea Boku, Controller at World Learning: “Venn’s integration has transformed the efficiency, accuracy, and quality of the information we use. The data is clean, reconciliations are easy now, and we’ve saved hours in data entry. We also expect our 990 tax reporting to go much more smoothly.”
Venn is pleased to have played some small role in helping World Learning carry on its vision: “to build a more peaceful, sustainable, and just world.” The organization was founded in 1932 as an “Experiment” was the inspiration and model for John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps. Today, it offers programs on six of the world’s seven continents.
