Papillion Community Foundation saves a monumental amount of time with Aplos

Challenge

The Papillion Community Foundation in Nebraska strives to help everyone in the area feel at home. With community events that draw in 50,000 people and service projects throughout Sarpy County, the foundation relies on donors and supporters who can contribute to their various funds.

What originally started as a search for a database for relationship management quickly turned into an entire software switch. The foundation was using QuickBooks for the accounting, but they also needed a CRM. Joe Hunter, Executive Director of Papillion Community Foundation, explained, “When I started putting pricing together for what an additional CRM was going to cost, we were talking $10-15,000 a year, additionally, which for an organization our size is a lot of money.”

The foundation also chose to go into fund management, which had additional accounting complications. “Up until that point, we had really just planned a couple of community events each year,” said Hunter, “but now we’re taking on fund management for other organizations, so we realized that we needed something that was more robust to accommodate that sort of accounting, and QuickBooks Online just couldn’t do that in an easy way for us.”

“The staff and our board have gained a much better financial literacy and understanding of where we’re at as an organization.”

Solution

“I found Aplos online just stumbling through some of the CRMs that were out there, and it was everything that we needed. It’s got the CRM, it’s got the accounting side, and we can do marketing,” he said, and “it really became a no-brainer for us at that point.”

Since Hunter was also having trouble with QuickBooks, he was excited to see how much easier it was for him to use Aplos for accounting. “The fund accounting is my favorite piece. I had no accounting experience coming into this role, and then being exposed to QuickBooks Online, my head was just spinning. But once we started using Aplos, everything clicked for me. It made so much more sense,” he said.

It wasn’t just the Executive Director who embraced Aplos as the foundation’s solution to fund accounting and relationship management. The board loves it as well. “My board has seen the benefit of having Aplos as a member of our team,” Hunter raved. “The staff and our board have gained a much better financial literacy and understanding of where we’re at as an organization, so that’s really allowed us to grow.”

Hunter also praised the support Aplos continues to provide, saying, “That support function has been huge. We don’t have an IT department or an accounting department, so having that support there to answer software or accounting questions is like having those folks here in the office with us when we need them.”

"Aplos has saved us a monumental amount of time."

Results

Hunter and the Papillion Community Foundation board have appreciated the accuracy and reporting that Aplos provides, but one of the biggest areas it has helped with is time.

“Our experience with Aplos has been fabulous. I can’t say good enough things about the system. I tell everybody,” Hunter said. “Aplos has saved us a monumental amount of time. I can be out fundraising and focusing on that rather than working on reconciling the accounts at the end of every month. What used to take me a week to do now takes me about two or three hours to do, so that’s a lot of time that we have saved because of the platform.”

Download the Papillion Community Foundation case study (PDF).

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