Sage Intacct Saves Non-Profit Twenty Hours of Reporting per Cycle

Case Study: Cook Inlet Tribal Council

For nearly 20 years, Cook Inlet Tribal Council (CITC) has provided education, social, and economic services. CITC collaborates with eight other federally recognized Cook Inlet tribes to strengthen the program and social service capacity for their region’s tribal communities. They self fund and rely on 90 separate grants to run their programs and services, and there are a lot of moving parts.

Shelly Kells, Senior Director of Finance describes CITC as, “a large social services, nonprofit organization. CITC itself operates five different program departments; we also have four subsidiaries, three of which are nonprofits and one is a for-profit.”

CITC Non Profit Programming Overview

“Our program departments mostly operate reimbursement based grants with some formula funded grants. A couple of our departments also bring in medical billing revenue. Additionally, we do some social enterprise activities, providing accounting and IT services to external companies, facility rentals, and operating several coffee shops. Our three non profit subsidiaries operate with similar funding streams and our for-profit began as an investment holding company, but has been expanding into more social enterprise activities as well. The intention of that organization is to generate revenue that can then be reinvested into CITC's program departments to create more predictable and self sufficient funding."

Information Overload with Unsynchronized Systems

For years, CITC navigated disjointed software programs. Their entire organization was split between Microsoft Dynamics GP, and QuickBooks – leading to distinct disadvantages. “There were a lot of issues with our previous software reporting, because it was not intuitive – and there were so many different things going on.

Targeted Access And Information

“One of the main draws to Sage Intacct was how customized the reporting was.” Ultimately, CITC as an organization, needed many people to have access to a lot of information. "Everybody needs to see different information and Intacct has the ability to create reports specific for users in a way that is informative and useful,” says Shelly.

To have better control over their chart of accounts, CITC leveraged dimensions. Shelly continues by saying that everyone is now on the same chart of accounts, “We were able to be intentional with our numbering of things so that we can also set up some of our internal allocations to be automated based on ranges instead of one offs.”

Solutions in Seconds

Now, if someone has the project number, they can find every detail about a grant that they are looking to find – within seconds. “That’s one of the biggest things,” continues Alex. “Intacct is now helping run reports, getting people details of what grants are open, and what grants are closed. Is there another year? What does the funding look like for FY 23? We have all the grant information built in.”

“We would constantly be fielding questions about grants. What’s the end date or the full award amount? A lot of grants have different hierarchies of who awarded the funding. Is the grant federal or state pass through? Does it go on the federal schedule? We were able to build all of those fields into Intacct instead of going through our internal drive, digging through folders, and trying to find the most updated information.”

Implementation Without A Hitch

“I have nothing but good things to say about Sockeye. We get such a high level of support from a partner that understands our business model and the environment that we work in. Esther Goodstein’s been with us for a couple of years, and she did the whole conversion with us. We get exceptional customer service from Sockeye.”

Collaboration Between Teams

The Sockeye and CITC teams worked together to custom create a Grant Tab for CITC, too. Their joint effort started by asking questions. Alex asked, “What are the most common questions we’re getting from executive management? We built those fields in.” The team then thought about what else would be needed to pull reports, and they added those fields, too.

“There was a lot of collaboration and all of the managers added a couple fields. We’re still adding some fields every now and then when we realize it would be easier if we had certain data. We were really intentional about how we structured it.”

CITC Company Overview

Cook Inlet Tribal Council, Inc. (CITC) has provided education, social, and economic services in collaboration with eight other federally recognized Cook Inlet tribes since its incorporation as a nonprofit organization in 1983. They self fund and rely on roughly 90 separate grants to run their programs and services. These include child and family, recovery and addiction, youth education, employment and training, and job placement services.