Accordia Global Health Foundation’s (“Accordia”) mission is to overcome the burden of infectious diseases in Africa by creating innovative health models, building centers of excellence, and strengthening medical instructions. They are a non-profit organization backed by a distinguished alliance of experts from leading academic institutions around the world. They are investing in strengthening African health systems, not only to address today’s need to fight HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, but also to prepare a new generation of African healthcare leaders for tomorrow’s challenges.
Situation
Accordia previously used QuickBooks to maintain their accounting books. Wipfli Systems migrated Accordia from QuickBooks to Intacct which eliminated the need to track grant costs manually in Excel.
Strategy
“As a non-profit dedicated to fighting infectious diseases in Africa, we take great care to steward our funding sources and administrative resources wisely so that we invest more in the mission and less in back-office support for it. Wipfli understood that and put Accordia on the path to increasing our efficiency, providing visibility for our stakeholders, with a solution that has the best ROI and the lowest total cost of ownership. They were very knowledgeable and easy to work with.” – Huilian Ji, Director of Finance
Key requirements included:
• Enhanced grant and financial reporting capabilities so that information is not maintained in Excel spreadsheets
• Ability to import daily/weekly transactions into the General Ledger and Accounts Payable
• Multi-dimensional reporting capabilities so that revenues and expenses can be racked by grant, funding source, events and activities, department, vendor, customer and employee
• Accessible anywhere
• Real time dashboards and reporting for grant managers (view only basis)
Key challenges included:
• Accordia did not have an IT infrastructure that could maintain or support an on-premise solution
• Accordia had a limited budget and needed a solution that provided the lowest total cost of ownership and the highest return on investment
• Accordia’s QuickBooks system did not have the capability to track grants costs that spanning fiscal years. As a result this information was maintained in Excel spreadsheets
Benefits
Now, all grant tracking and reporting is done within Intacct, not Excel. Grant Managers can access up-to-date grant reports and dashboards from a web-browser, and Accordia has the ability to easily track revenues and expenses by grant, funding source, events and activities, department, vendor, customer and employee. Accordia is now considering implementing the Intacct employee time and expense reporting to further streamline its accounting operations.
