Real-Time Financial Data for Projects

In 2025, CS&S took a major step forward in strengthening our financial infrastructure with the organization-wide implementation of the Sage Intacct Accounting system. When Ron Brooks was appointed CFO in late 2024, a critical goal was to upgrade our financial systems to bring greater transparency and real-time financial data to the projects. Ron and the Finance team completed the much needed systems migration in July 2025, launching customizable dashboards, custom reports, and integrating the new system with our other applications such as Ramp and Trinet. This rollout introduced real-time financial dashboards for each project, giving teams immediate visibility into their financial data, and empowering them to make more informed and timely decisions. This data can be filtered in multiple ways, including by grant source, project, or functional activity.

What does this mean for project teams? Teams can now view transactions as they post in our accounting system, rather than waiting for a report at the end of the month. We still perform a 15 day financial close each month, but projects don’t need to wait for the month-end close to see data and ask questions. Teams can also drill down into the accounts to better understand the details of the transaction by grant source, restriction, vendor, etc.

What’s next? This year we’ll be modernizing our budgeting process with Sage’s Planning Tool. This will bring our accounting practices even more up-to-date and improve accuracy by using an integrated system for budgeting that ties directly into the accounting system, instead of the cumbersome spreadsheets of the past. In addition, this will enable our projects to plan more effectively for sustainability by emphasizing financial planning and analysis year round. Ron and the Finance Team will lead financial literacy sessions as the system is rolled out.

We want to thank all of our project teams for your collaboration while we migrated systems and set up Sage-Intacct in 2025. We’ve received many great questions and requests, which have made the reporting better for everyone. If you’re seeking a fiscal sponsor that prioritizes financial transparency leveraged with technology, we’d love to talk.

The image below contains an example dashboard.

Example dashboard for fiscally sponsored projects
Example dashboard for fiscally sponsored projects