Challenge:
Bookkeeping, Accounting and Financial Reporting is never usually fun. Legacy software applications make it difficult to process information and share it amongst team members. Framework was looking for ways to improve our Financial Governance as we scaled. Additionally, to provide skilled volunteers (e.g. Treasurer/Accountants) with timely information about our finances was a constant challenge. So we were seeking to find a suite of software to take the pain out of Bookkeeping in the Cloud. In this example, we are trying to better manage:
- Cheques with funder letters: What approach could we take to digitize all physical documents we receive in an effective manner?
- Online payment gateways: How to administer and build workflow into our two main gateways (e.g. CanadaHelps and EventBrite) with our bank account?
The following illustration summarizes the workflow & software applications that are involved with managing bookkeeping and reporting in the cloud.
Approach:
As Framework has also adopted our 'Share-By-Default' mandate, we also wanted to ensure that we could easily create reports that could be published online or shared with the right people, at the right time. Therefore we chose to deepen our integration with Box, SmartSheet, Google Apps and Salesforce.com WITH our CanadaHelps, EventBrite and RBC Bank account.
Impact:
It now takes just a few minutes to download reports and store the files where they are easily accessible. Additionally, digitizing our entire financial documents ensure that everything is searchable and indexed. In the future, audits should take a fraction of the time even while Framework scales our activities.
Long Term Plan:
Depending on how/if Quickbooks innovates its core desktop product, Framework might seek accounting alternatives. We are currently evaluating SimplePay --> Xeno/Wave Accounting --> Freshbooks as our alternative to QuickBooks. Another major decision is how to integrate our online donation and event registration gateways with Salesforce.com, our CRM of choice.