Birch Family Services Case Study

Introduction

Since 1975, Birch Family Services has served over 20,000 people with autism and developmental disabilities and their families throughout New York City. They have grown from a single classroom to a provider of educational and long-term supports in 30 locations in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

Their programs have expanded over the years and now include a wide array of individualized, person-centered services. Birch’s programs have helped people with autism and developmental disabilities and their families navigate significant transitions across the life cycle for more than 40 years. Throughout their history, they have demonstrated the ability to provide quality programs that support the individual needs of children, adolescents, and adults so that they can reach their full potential.

Situation

The Birch Family Services Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) team was spending too much time on the data and not enough time analyzing the data. After implementing Sage Intacct, their Sage Intacct partner, Carlson, recommended DataBlend knowing that the implementation team would be able to quickly deploy an integration between Sage Intacct and Workday Adaptive Planning. DataBlend has vast experience connecting the two systems.

Challenge

The Birch Family Services FP&A team historically was spending too much time doing manual data entry, exporting data from Sage Intacct, manipulating it manually within spreadsheets, adding proper formatting, creating reports, uploading the data back into Workday Adaptive Planning.

“I was spending the better part of a day doing manual processes between Sage Intacct and Workday Adaptive Planning. As a nonprofit, we need to show data different ways. I need to generate reports for the Board of Directors, Program Leadership, Government Funders, etc., They all have different requirements and need customizations,” says Claire Mahmood, Birch Family Services, Director of Financial Planning & Analysis.

Reporting and visibility are one of the biggest challenges non-profit finance and accounting professionals must deal with. They have responsibilities to the board of directors, donors, and leadership team to maintain a level of transparency. Finance and accounting teams gain a lot of value from data integration. It creates more efficient processes and brings together data gathered from different finance systems to enable real-time decision making.

Solution

By integrating Sage Intacct and Workday Adaptive Planning, Birch Family Services has drastically improved efficiencies and streamlined finance and accounting processes. Now, instead of manually processing data, they do it with a click of a button. DataBlend runs seamlessly in the background while Birch Family Services can focus on more strategic items.

“At year end, we were having to import data manually, so we had to wait until everything closes to pull data from Sage Intacct to Workday Adaptive Planning. With DataBlend, we can pull data in before the books officially close, so that we can see an estimate of where we are at. DataBlend is so easy that pulling data multiple times is a breeze.”

It takes 2-3 minutes to run Birch Family Services’ workflow starting from data collections and ending with full import into Workday Adaptive Planning.

Results with DataBlend:

Automated the export, transform, and load process
Gained access to real-time, accurate financial data
Decreased opportunity for errors
Increased time savings
Decreased monthly workload
Manipulate reports as needed for different audiences

In addition, DataBlend’s user-friendly interface allows to run the whole process for different time periods by simply changing parameters in pop-up window.

“We have improved data accuracy. It is nice to pull in actuals to see the error message – it has given us a mechanism for coding issues. We can go back to accounting to correct the issues. We wouldn’t have been able to see errors as quickly because it wouldn’t have been discovered until later in the year.”

Conclusion

Since partnering with DataBlend, Birch Family Services can now focus on higher value work rather than manipulating spreadsheets.

“DataBlend was very easy to deploy. It was a very straightforward process that didn’t even need to involve our IT department. As we look ahead, we are in the process of using DataBlend to connect Salesforce.”

Sample Transformations:

DataBlend collector exports transactional data from General Ledger accounts in Sage Intacct
DataBlend cleans data by filtering out data «noise» (non-relevant entries or not used account numbers)
Complex logic applied to form values for Workday Adaptive Planning levels by concatenating strings from different fields
Reversing sign transformation applied on amounts for selected accounts
Exported as text string amounts are converted to decimal type for performing aggregations
Date formatting applied to match Workday Adaptive Planning date format
Pivoting technique applied for Income Statement and Balance Sheet reports

Birch Family Services Reduces Manual Work with DataBlend

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