AccuFund Case Study - Community Action Agency
LYNN ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY, INC.
- LYNN, MASSACHUSETTS
Lynn Economic Opportunity, Inc., (LEO) a non-profit with
$7 million in revenues and 75 employees, has been
providing services to the Lynn, Massachusetts community
for 35 years. LEO's services include housing assistance
services, family advocacy, emergency assistance, the fuel
assistance program, daycare, and temporary housing
assistance.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The accounting department is comprised of a
manager and five staff to handle all financial
reporting, payables, receivables and payroll
functions. A new fiscal manager in 2001
faced a commercial accounting product that
had been installed and was not at all geared to
the needs of LEO from a nonprofit reporting
or operating standpoint. The staff was unable
to track daycare billings and they were cutting
XXX fuel assistance checks in a nonintegrated
system each month during the
heating system. The fiscal manager depended
on spreadsheet systems to track cross-year
grant activity.
THE ACCUFUND SOLUTION
LEO staff did an extensive review of available solutions
focusing on products designed specifically for the operating
and financial reporting needs of NPOs. They determined
that the AccuFund Accounting Suite provided the most
complete solution at a very reasonable price. They were
just reaching their fiscal year end and wanted the system
live for the beginning of the new year. The primary
implementation was completed over a one month period,
which included designing a revised chart of accounts to
maximize reporting capabilities, vendor and customer file
conversion and bringing Accounts Payable and Accounts
Receivable for daycare billing live in a short time period.
The Accounts Receivable system includes client as well as customer billing, allowing one parent to be connected to multiple children for daycare purposes. Tenant billing was brought up slightly later. For the tenant billing, the AccuFund Report/Forms Designer was utilized to write delinquency notices that are printed directly from the system at mid-month instead of being hand typed.
The fiscal staff had a reprieve on Fuel Assistance payments
as the conversion was done during the summer. When fuel
heating season arrived the payment approval system was
integrated with Accounts Payable in a separate company to
reduce transactions in the main company. This gave the
staff cash management and bank
reconciliation capabilities for the fuel program
without all the detail in the General Ledger
for the main company. The Fuel transactions
are summarized monthly and posted through
an import to the main company.
After training by AccuFund staff, all financial reports were developed by the fiscal manager. Instead of the very long process developing in the old software, the Fiscal Manger was able to develop all the necessary reports in a very short time. The Fiscal Manager's estimate was that the set of reports that required several days to develop in the old software took only a few hours to fully develop in AccuFund, saving her time for other fiscal management tasks. The reports include daily cash status reports to manage drawdowns, and a complete set of monthly reports for program and executive management that allow each to easily identify issues in both their fiscal year and grant funding years.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ACCUFUND
Visit our website at www.accufund.com, call your
local reseller or our sales department at 877-872-2228.
We would be pleased to discuss this case study with
you, discuss how AccuFund will help your fiscal
department and put you in touch with a local reseller
certified to install and support the AccuFund
Accounting Suite.
