From Static Spreadsheets to Strategic Insights
A Kainos Q&A with Goodwill of The Heartland: Making Every Dollar Work For the Mission
Goodwill of the Heartland's Chief Financial Officer, Tammi Erb, Controller, Maria Beamer, and Business Analyst, Bruce Crawford, recently sat down with our Workday Adaptive Planning team to offer insights to other nonprofits about how they approached and successfully executed a comprehensive FP&A transformation. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, which we’ve edited for clarity.
What prompted Goodwill of the Heartland to look for a new FP&A solution?
Maria Beamer: We knew we had an opportunity with our budget process. We had been using Excel spreadsheets for years and it was very cumbersome and time-consuming with a lot of manual intervention. For example, it took at least four hours just to pull the data for month-end and board reporting.
What might the opportunity costs have been if you’d delayed the shift to Workday Adaptive Planning and continued with Excel?
Maria Beamer: How do we not shift to Workday Adaptive Planning? Without it, you lose the opportunity to do the analysis that helps define your strategic position and plan for the future. We’d spend hours in the weeds just pulling data and building reports till the eleventh hour and you don’t allow yourself enough time to actually do any kind of scenario analysis. You lose a lot of opportunities to figure out your strategic position in alignment with your vision and hwo you plan out for the next few years.
Ownership by budget managers of the budget process is another opportunity we would have lost. Without Workday Adaptive Planning, managers would just send their budgets to us to input and wouldn’t have visibility or the option to make changes in real time and see the bottom-line impact.
How has Workday Adaptive Planning changed how Goodwill of the Heartland approaches its strategic planning and vision?
Maria Beamer: Our CFO, Tammi, is working on our three-year strategic plan and having the ability to do scenario analysis with real-time outputs makes our analysis more valuable, as opposed to waiting for impacts to trickle down through reporting. Now, instead of having to wait and see what the reports look like and go back to the drawing board, we can see the effects in real time.
It's helped make our budgeting process more front-loaded and reduces the need for repeats and multiple versions. We implemented a personnel sheet that gave us a huge lift in our budget preparation time. With everything that stems from your salary line it was a huge improvement over Excel sheets and gives everyone involved in the budget process a view of what their people expense looks like.
Do you have any insights gained during your Workday Adaptive Planning transformation that could help other nonprofits as they evaluate their FP&A tools and take on modernization initiatives?
Bruce Crawford: One of the lessons learned is to ask your implementor for tips and tricks. We only have to go to one place now for our information, and just having a dozen or so tips and tricks really helps you learn how easy it is to navigate. If we had to do it over again we probably would have given ourselves more time to learn the software.
If you were going to go forward with Adaptive, I would recommend Kainos as an implementor. Kainos gave us great support during the implementation and it really made the difference for us.
It’s a stressful experience to implement new software but I think this went really well. Before Adaptive, my CFO Tammy and I usually had a lot of work to do over the Thanksgiving holiday but this year I was able to take a few extra days off.