Before transitioning to Sage Intacct, Code for Science & Society (CS&S) used Xero as its accounting system. While Xero met our basic accounting needs, CS&S has always prided itself on providing top-tier fiscal sponsor services to the projects we support. We therefore challenged ourselves to fundamentally rebuild our financial operations to reflect that commitment.
At the center of this effort were two questions:
How do we provide maximum financial transparency to our projects?
How do we make that financial information available in real time?
These questions became the foundation for our transition to Sage Intacct and the broader redesign of our financial services. Rather than simply replacing one accounting system with another, we used the transition as an opportunity to build a more transparent, accessible, and responsive financial infrastructure for our projects that integrates across the systems we utilize.
Transitioning to the Sage Intacct platform has fundamentally re-engineered our financial ecosystem. The most immediate benefit was the dramatic enhancement of financial transparency and the financial clarity and empowerment it gave our fiscally sponsored projects (FSPs).
The Sage Intacct platform provides granular visibility into every transaction within each FSP, and each Grant/Project. Authorized stakeholders can now trace the entire lifecycle of an expense or grant with just a few clicks. By exposing data-driven insights clearly, the platform fosters a culture of fiscal responsibility and trust among CS&S Core Staff, the CS&S Board, FSPs, and our funders.
Beyond visibility, the new architecture has transformed our reporting response time. In the past, month-end financials were manually extracted with little automation. While the financial details were stored in one system, the month-end results were presented in manually created spreadsheets for each FSP. This process delayed critical data delivery by days or even weeks. Change requests required discarding the manual spreadsheets, recreating them, and then deleting the older version.
Sage Intacct solves this lag through automated dashboard reporting. Routine financial reports such as Statement of Activities, Budget vs Actual, Accounts Payable Aging, and Accounts Receivable are now compiled automatically in real time. What used to take hours or days now takes seconds. A short response time empowers the Finance team and our projects to shift from historical data entry to forward-looking data analysis.
The combination of unparalleled transparency and rapid reporting provides each FSP, their Advisory Council, CS&S Core Staff, and the CS&S Board with a distinct strategic advantage. Decision-makers no longer rely on outdated metrics or guesswork. Instead, they can look at live dashboards to assess grant balances, organizational runway, budget utilization, inflows, expenditures, and other metrics specific to each FSP’s needs. Additionally, everyone can do so in their own time and on their own schedule. This agility allows all users to pivot quickly in response to funder requests, capture unexpected grant opportunities, work across multiple time zones, and proactively mitigate ambiguity as we navigate the current, challenging nonprofit funding environment.
Ultimately, converting to Sage Intacct was more than just a software upgrade; it was a foundational catalyst for long-term strategic planning and financial health that reflects the core value of providing top-tier fiscal sponsor services that Code for Science & Society is known for in the nonprofit community.