6 Reasons to Implement Powerful SaaS Budgeting Software
SaaS budgeting software helps public sector organizations improve the budgeting process by...
Client name: The Parkinson’s Foundation
“[Questica, a Euna Solutions brand] is an extremely powerful and useful tool that will help us to grow our foundation and truly make a difference”
Curt De Greff
Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer, The Parkinson’s Foundation
The Parkinson’s Foundation makes life better for people with Parkinson’s disease by improving care and advancing research toward a cure. In everything they do, they build on the energy, experience and passion of the global Parkinson’s community. More information can be found at www.parkinson.org
Financial System: Blackbaud’s FE NXT
Annual Budget: $38 million
Solution: Questica Budget, a Euna Solutions brand
Business Need: The Parkinson’s Foundation needed to prepare department budgets in one centralized system and eliminate cumbersome, error
prone spreadsheets.
Business Benefits
The Parkinson’s Foundation had a manual budgeting process that was done primarily using Excel spreadsheets. This process was very time-consuming, particularly the aggregation of spreadsheets between various departments at the Foundation. It was difficult for the finance teams to make changes quickly and efficiently because they would have to be laboriously sent back and forth between different departments. There also wasn’t always a clear way to see the justifications behind the numbers supplied by departments, and many times management did not have a good understanding of what was driving additional expenses and revenue. In addition, actual and budget data included allocations with the general ledger (GL) accounts that also contained direct costs, making it difficult to generate reliable department and program profit and loss (P&L) statements to compare actual versus budget data.
The main pain points that the Parkinson’s Foundation were hoping to solve were:
The Parkinson’s Foundation implemented Power Plan as a complement to its Financial Edge General Ledger system to be able to budget more efficiently and to permit monthly reporting to permit departments to produce their own P&Ls to track their performance. With the help of PowerPlan consulting, it modified its allocation budgeting and reporting to eliminate distortions in its accounting.
The Parkinson’s Foundation was able to access PowerPlan’s easy to use budgeting and reporting capabilities to prepare its budget and review results and overall performance. Whereas previously, responsibility reporting had to be prepared centrally for each department and program, now staff can generate their own actual P&Ls and make the necessary adjustments to meet budget. They can also drill down to the invoice level, to truly understand their expenses, without having to consult with the Accounting Department.
Moving away from aggregating files manually PowerPlan allows the Parkinson’s Foundation team to work collaboratively to assemble the budget.
By allowing staff members to work from one collaborative space, PowerPlan has enabled the Parkinson’s Foundation to save time and simplify processes for their budgeting team.
In addition, elimination of the distortions of allocations from department and program P&Ls gives managers the ability to manage the budget effectively, while still complying with GAAP functional expense reporting requirements.
During the PowerPlan implementation process, the Parkinson’s Foundation was assigned a Project Manager, who became their main resource for implementation. The Parkinson’s Foundation team found their PM to be a great support, and a fantastic resource throughout the implementation process, and beyond. PowerPlan consultants got directly involved to help the Foundation develop an effective system to budget and record allocations, showing outstanding insights into the Foundation’s needs.
PowerPlan transformed the Parkinson’s Foundation’s budgeting process by giving them a powerful, yet easy to navigate system for preparing their budgets accurately.
Download a full PDF copy of “Client Story: The Parkinson’s Foundation” today.
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