Rocky mountain youth corps secures $340K in new funding by moving to Sage Intacct

Rocky Mountain Youth Corps (RMYC) is a community nonprofit in New Mexico that provides comprehensive workforce development training and educational enhancement programs to youth between the ages of 17 and 25. By working on a variety of important land conservation, recreation, education, and historic preservation projects across the states, corps members discover their potential for healthy, productive lives and make a positive difference in themselves and their communities.

Recently, we had the opportunity to check in with RMYC’s director of finance, Rosanna Aragon, who shared the impact of the organization’s recent move from Intuit QuickBooks to Sage Intacct. The organization’s results are outlined in our new customer success story including:

• Increased funding $340,000 by demonstrating programming expansion 
• Improved finance efficiency by 50% 
• Saved 30 person-hours each month through automated workflows  
• Drove donor confidence and decision-making with better visibility  

Earlier this year, Aragon decided it was time to move to a more robust financial management solution and chose Sage Intacct to give RMYC’s leadership better visibility into the health of the organization overall, as well as the costs of individual programs specifically.

Replacing Excel workarounds with a robust fund accounting and financial management system

Before the pandemic, RMYC was funded by a limited set of grants and income streams, but as relief funding started flowing, the organization was able to expand its operations. Today, half of its programs are funded by multiple donors and grants, often with a percentage matched by a partner organization like AmeriCorps. While this increases RMYC’s impact, it also adds greater complexity to the organization’s financial operations.

Aragon recalls, “Before we moved to Sage Intacct, I was basically a spreadsheet guru, because I had to be really creative to build reports for our program managers and donors. I was building spreadsheet upon spreadsheet upon spreadsheet to track the funding sources for each project, and QuickBooks didn’t have the fund accounting functionality to compare our financials across office locations, crew types, or programs.”

She was also spending hours every two weeksto allocate payroll back to the correct grants, projects, and departments. “I knew we needed a better system and was able to convince leadership of how much money it would save us over time because I could be doing so much more value-added work if I was no longer spending 40 hours doing spreadsheets.”

RMYC worked with Sage Intacct partner Wipfli to resolve these challenges by deploying the Sage Intacct’s dynamic allocations, budgeting and planning, and fund accounting capabilities.

Newfound transparency opens the door to program expansion

In particular, Sage Intacct Planning is improving transparency and decision-making at RMYC. Aragon can now give each program manager and director a clear view into their budget-vs-actuals, reimbursement billings, and receivables, along with total spending from the inception of each grant. With at-a-glance dashboards in Sage Intacct, the organization’s canine leadership, conservation, and prevention stakeholders can see exactly who’s putting time against their grants and how many corps members are actively serving.

“We now have project budgets and reporting in Sage Intacct with all our expenditures and income. This helps us more accurately bid on new projects so we can secure adequate funding,” noted Aragon. “It’s much cleaner than my previous workbook, which had 30 spreadsheets all tied into one summarized version by program.”

Beyond budgeting, Sage Intacct helps RMYC’s leadership easily compare financials across multiple locations, crew types, projects, and more. This visibility has already played a key role in helping the organization double its funding, as well as find excess funds to redirect towards their mission.

“Our development director was able to go out and find additional funding from the forest and park foundations, because I could show them how little we were making on certain projects and why we required more outside funding – something that was very tedious in Excel,” Aragon shared. She added, “I also built a fundraising dashboard to help the team monitor sponsorships and donations that come in for our different events, as well as the number and ages of corps members we work with on the conservation side, which helps them demonstrate our program reach.” 

Sage Intacct also enables Aragon to monitor key trends like operating cash flow, investments, fixed assets, and inventory tracking all in one place. “If our cash balance goes up or down as compared to previous months, I can see that quickly in Sage Intacct, and stay on top of our pending reimbursements and accounts payables,” pointed out Aragon. “I also have a compliance dashboard that shows our statement of financial position, statement of revenue for the 990 tax return, statement of functional expenses, and other items we need for our auditors.”

A finance transformation…

In addition, Sage Intacct helped Aragon eliminate unnecessary manual work and free up around 30 hours a month – improving efficiency by 50%. Much of these time savings are in the grant billing process. With Sage Intacct’s dimensional capabilities, RMYC can easily capture and apply costs to each partner or grant across dozens of different projects.

Two of Aragon’s favorite features in Sage Intacct are its ability to import data from other systems like ADP and Network for Good, and the option to attach and store digital files. She noted, “The import process is just spectacular. I can’t say enough about how easy it is to get information into the system as either financial data or operational statistics. With ADP data pulled into Sage Intacct, I can even drill down into different reports to view payroll information by employee or by position. I’ve also set up a number of attachment folders to store different program agreements, grant award letters, and other documentation.”

In reflecting on the transformation of her role over the past year, Aragon commented, “I’ve been able to take some steps back and really look at the direction of the organization. During COVID-19, this has freed me up to help support more important decision-making on the human resource side, with analysis around COVID vaccinations, local health guidelines, and other moving targets.”

She also noted that her workaholic tendencies are finally in check now that she’s no longer putting in 20-30 extra hours every month, concluding, “I was spending so much time doing manual work before, but now I can walk away from it after I’m done with my eight-hour day. It’s been awesome to have time to learn more about Sage Intacct and what it can do for our organization.”

Learn more about Rocky Mountain Youth Corps and how its team not only increased finance productivity – but doubled grant funding as well – in our new Sage Intacct customer story.