How AP automation helped BGC Okanagan support children and families
Read on to learn how automating accounts payable with Sage Accounts Payable Automation helped BGC Okanagan spend less time on AP and more time supporting children and youth:
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Automating accounts payable (AP) is a great way for any organization to devote more time to achieving its vision. In the nonprofit sector, spending less time on AP means more time spent changing lives.
BGC Okanagan (formerly The Boys and Girls Clubs of the Okanagan) provides vital support to children, youth and families in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. Founded in 1959, BGC Okanagan provides care before and after school, daycare, and recreational activities for children and youth of all ages, as well as their families.
This chapter of BGC Canada, the country’s largest nonprofit agency for children and youth, plays a vital role in the region. “It really is a wonderful organization,” employee Chloe Eccles told local newspaper iNFOnews. “We provide so many different programs in the Okanagan.”
Of course, these programs are only possible with a top-notch team managing the books — a job that’s gotten harder as the agency grows.
When Director of Finance Patti Hait joined BGC Okanagan 12 years ago, it was a $6 million agency. This year, it’s a $17.5 million agency. “We’ve had explosive growth,” Patti says. “With that comes a lot of challenges in the finance department.”
Cutting down on data entry — and time on the road
Finance leaders are well aware of the pitfalls of manual AP. More than one in ten documents goes missing. Processing paper-based invoices is five times more expensive than processing invoices digitally. But sometimes, the most pressing problem is simply the time it takes to get a document from one place to another.
Time in the car takes away from time with vendor partners
The Okanagan Valley is a vast region, and BGC Okanagan serves all of it. Its 48 service locations span a 200-kilometer area between the Washington state border and the region’s northern edge.
That geographic reach made for an especially cumbersome and inefficient accounts payable process. The accounting team used three-part manual purchase orders according to an approval authority matrix and an expenditure authority matrix.
“We had a good system in place,” Patti says. “But often, the approver based on the expenditure matrix wasn’t in the same city as the people who wanted to do the purchasing.”
That meant that paper POs were couriered up and down the Okanagan Valley. Worse, invoices often arrived before the finance department received paperwork showing who initiated the purchase.
“We have one accounts payable technician who was probably spending 20 of her 35 weekly hours chasing down paperwork to support invoices,” Patti says. That’s 20 hours that she couldn’t spend engaging with vendors who are critical to BGC Okanagan’s mission of supporting children and youth.
Check-signing shouldn’t require a commute
The accounts payable inefficiency issue came to a head when the finance team’s treasurer was looking for board members to come in and sign checks.
“I reached out to one board member who was located about an hour north, and he said that if we could find an electronic system, he’d be happy to be an approver,” she said.
Patti kicked off a search to find a tool her board member could use to sign checks remotely — and ended up with a solution that was beyond anything she had imagined.
“What I was seeing in this demo was our system, digitized”
Patti was excited from the moment she saw her first demo of Sage AP Automation (APA).
“What I was seeing in this demo was our system, digitized and becoming more efficient and answering all of our questions and solving all of our issues,” she says. “From the purchase order to the invoice module to the expense module, I was like… ‘I want that product!’”
Of course, Patti and her team wanted a solution that truly served the entire agency, not just the finance department. Their vision was to reduce the amount of time staff spend in the office so they can spend more time with the kids the agency serves.
A seamless transition from manual to digital
Translating BGC Okanagan’s AP process into Sage APA was straightforward, especially since Sage provides support for complex approval matrices. BGC Okanagan runs over 100 programs, each of which has a series of general ledger (GL) accounts with certain approvers. On top of that, the agency sets limits according to approvers’ positions.
It was even easier to get BGC Okanagan’s staff on board. “The resources available to get this set up and implemented are unparalleled,” Patti says. “We did one training for purchase orders and one training for expenses and we went live two weeks later.”
They like it! They really like it!
Just a few months in, BGC Okanagan already has a robust user base: 90 staff across the valley using the expense module, and 150 using the purchase order module. “Everybody was an eager adopter,” Patti says. “It was such a great affirmation for the finance team that this is working for the entire agency.”
Some of the features users praise include:
- Automated PO coding to match POs with approvers and invoices
- Automated creation of payments
- Vacation delegation, which allows approvers to delegate responsibility while they’re out of office
Goodbye, carbon copies; hello, caring for kids
Today, Patti estimates that the AP professional who once spent 20 hours a week chasing down paperwork saves a full two days per week — time that she can use to create vendor partnerships.
“Vendors are very important to being able to do the work that we do,” Patti says.
That’s just one example of how Sage APA has freed everyone at BGC Okanagan who deals with expenditures and purchases to focus on the organization’s mission. Even beyond the finance department, AP automation reduces time spent on data entry so staff can focus on what matters most: providing high-quality programming to support the community.
“We’re all about people at BGC Okanagan,” Patti says. “By implementing a system that’s electronic and digitized, we’ve allowed our staff to spend more time in-program than doing administrative tasks.” She estimates that the AP process, which used to take two weeks from start to finish, now takes about three days.
“It’s phenomenal,” Patti adds. “It’s a game changer.”
Not just for BGC Okanagan, either — for the children, youth and families across the valley’s 200 kilometers who benefit from its services.
