Established in 1967, the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy is an international, not-for-profit professional organization dedicated to developing the men and women who encourage charity in North America’s health care organizations. From executive directors and chief development officers to major gift officers, annual campaign managers, event coordinators and grant writers, their 5,000 members represent more than 2,200 health care facilities in the United States and Canada. In addition to serving as their members’ source for education, networking opportunities, and research on health care fundraising, AHP advocates on behalf of nonprofit hospitals and monitors legislative and regulatory issues.
Situation
AHP was using Microsoft Dynamics SL to maintain their accounting books and Microsoft FRx for financial reporting—and several workarounds had been put in place to help get the data from point A to point B. “We needed a more user-friendly solution,” says Lynn Murphy, AHP’s Chief Financial Officer and sole user of the tools. “It didn’t make sense to have large, cumbersome accounting software,” she continues. “It was much more than we needed and we didn’t want to pay for all of that.” What’s more, AHP needed their accounting system to accommodate multiple currencies and help them streamline the management of their two entities.
Plus, AHP was in the process of moving their organizational data and processes to the cloud to eliminate the need buy new hardware to keep up with software updates. “New software doesn’t run on old machines anymore!” explains Murphy, who found that Intacct’s cloud accounting software was a simpler, more streamlined solution that would better meet their needs
Strategy
“Wipfli was already our SL support and had always been very helpful,” says Murphy. “They made our transition to Intacct easy. We had a weekly meeting that kept us on target,” she says. “Our timeline was very smooth and went according to plan.”
Wipfli implemented Intacct core modules for AHP, leveraging the Intacct QuickStart Financial Non-profit template that includes pre-built and customizable dashboards, reports, and analytics. “Once our data was in the new system, Wipfli showed me how to get out what I needed,” Murphy says. And since Intacct’s upgrades are incremental and seamless, they are not a huge disruption or expense—and it’s easy for Murphy to make necessary adjustments to the way she does processing. “Intacct’s product is generally intuitive,” she explains, “but Wipfli walked me through anything that wasn’t clear so I’m able to make changes on my own. Those old workarounds are not necessary anymore, and,” Murphy adds, “the solution has been easy to use. I’m enjoying it!
Key requirements included:
• Fulfill the need for a cost-effective financial management system
• Manage multiple business entities and currencies more effectively
• Streamline the accounting and financial management processes in the cloud
Key challenges included:
• Limited client resources available for implementation
• Extracting data from Microsoft Dynamics SL for Intacct
Benefits:
Now, AHP can easily consolidate the financials of separate entities with multiple currencies. The use of Intacct smart import templates made data loading easy and efficient, and the organizations has eliminated software maintenance and upgrade costs.
