African Wildlife Foundation Working Efficiently with Serenic Navigator and Help from Capital Business Solutions
"Instead of spending their time on data entry and chasing down paper forms, they can concentrate on budget management and other more important duties.”
- Jeff Chrisfield, CFO at AWF
In order to help save endangered animals - such as mountain gorillas, elephants, leopards, bonobos and more - and preserve wild lands across the continent, the AWF has to tackle all kinds of tough business challenges. “Right now, we are administering about 70 or so active grants,” explains Jeff Chrisfield, CFO at AWF. “Our grants come in all sizes. We accept and track restricted grants starting at about $25 thousand dollars, but of course they go up into the multimillions. And that’s 70 grants spread across different programs that span nine geographical regions. Our challenge is weaving together the tapestry of funding.”
Just a few years ago, the AWF finance team was getting by with a system cobbled together from a Canadian edition of QuickBooks (“...because the Canadian version could do multiple currencies,” says Jeff), an antiquated enterprise accounting system, and a separate reporting package -- because the enterprise software couldn’t handle their reporting requirements.
All of this failed to solve some important challenges, and required time-intensive manual work and data entry at several different points in the process.
Naturally, they wanted to find a more sophisticated solution. “We reviewed a few possible solutions, but
there weren’t any that handled things we needed done like Serenic Navigator,”
says Jeff.
Initially, says Jeff, he was very interested by Serenic’s ability to replicate
data from one server to multiple geographically disparate servers. “Of course
it was fine to work over the Internet here in DC, but historically, we had
people in our Nairobi office dialing in; access wasn’t always steady, and
speeds could be very slow. The replication functionality we got with Serenic
helped us out there.” Capital Business Solutions (CBS) presented Serenic to
AWF. “I was impressed with CBS right
away. It was like they were really trying to find a solution that fit the way
we worked, not trying to fit us to a solution,” says Jeff.
But just a couple of years down the line, the reality has changed.
“There are new fiber optic lines that have improved speed and Internet
reliability in Nairobi.” And AWF, with help from CBS, has adapted to take
advantage of the improved African Internet capabilities. “We’ve consolidated
and merged all of our operations to one server in Nairobi. And having that one
database in Nairobi has allowed us to centralize our treasury and procurement
operations there, and split our general ledger team between Nairobi and
Washington DC.”
“Today, we have about 25 or our DC personnel on the system,” says Jeff. “We’re
adding about 50 in Kenya. By the time we’re all done, we’re going to have about
150 to 200 people in the system on a daily basis. But because it automates
so much manual work, it allows us to keep a very small, focused accounting
infrastructure. Our central finance team is still about eight people. We
haven’t had to staff up.”
So how have
the benefits stacked up for AWF?
“Where are
we now compared to where we were when we implemented Serenic? To begin with,”
Jeff says, “we’ve collapsed 11 company profiles into just one, eliminating the
need for that entire monthly consolidation step. Everyone is actually in the
same system, budget rules apply to everyone across the board. Plus, it’s sped
us up significantly; we have real time access to data.”
Jeff says that one of the biggest benefits for AWF was allowing them to
restructure the way the organization works. AWF has two main offices - one in
Washington and one in Nairobi, but operates field offices across Africa based
on specific grants and projects. “These offices have always been - by necessity
- very independent,” says Jeff. “They had a finance officer, and maybe an assistant,
a program director, and program people. But that wasn’t ideal. We were lucky we
never ran into a problem, but it made for weak internal controls -- these
people are in isolated offices, working altogether day in and day out, with
program people basically acting as signatories and as control checks from an
accounting standpoint. Plus, they’re busy implementing their programs, and
they’re not really trained in finance. So you can end up with a single person
doing more in the system than they should do. Again, we’ve been lucky, but it
exposes you to the risk.”
Jeff says that Serenic has allowed AWF to eliminate this exposure.”It meets
that need for a control process without having to hire lots of overhead finance
people for each field office,” he says. “With Serenic, you get the segregation
of duties by distributing the responsibilities. It centralizes procurement away
from the field office. Most large cash disbursement moves out of their purview
and leaves them able to concentrate on managing their budgets and with the
day-to-day logistics of getting people from point A to Point-B across the
African landscape - which can be challenging. That’s very meaningful to us.”
Serenic Web Portals
Soon, according to Jeff, everyone in his organization is going to be
using the Web Portal they’re currently rolling out. The Web portal will
function as both a requisition and expense-entry and -approval system.
As a Requisition Portal
With the advent of AWF’s new Serenic Web interface, when staff wants to
make a purchase, they will go to the Serenic Requisition Portal and enter all
the relevant information. “And as they enter it,” says Jeff, “it puts that data
directly into Serenic so it never has to be entered again.”
Once the requisition is entered, the approval flow is all handled by Serenic.
Emails are automatically generated and sent to the people responsible for
approving the requisition. “Then, when those people log in,” explains Jeff.
“They make the approval electronically. The approval automatically goes to a
procurement team in Nairobi who decides how to handle the purchase, and then
they issue the purchase order. No one has ever had to re-key any data, no paper
forms that have to get shipped around. The original requisition has most or all
of the pertinent information on the transaction so when it gets to procurement,
it’s pretty much done. They may have to supply a couple of terms, but they
don’t have to re-key and lines or budget codes. When it goes to Treasury, they
just convert the PO to an invoice - maybe they have to correct or add tax or
shipping, but effectively all the data is already right there, in the system.”
Instead of spending their time on data entry and chasing
down paper forms, they can concentrate on budget management and other more
important duties.”
As an Expense Portal
“As the expense
portal, it has a lot of the same automation advantages,” says Jeff. “For
instance, we do a lot of advances for staff travel expenses - in Africa it’s
very common to give cash advances for travel. So entails an expense report
after the fact.
“All of that used to be done via an Excel form,” he continues, “that would get
printed out, staff would fill out the form, attach their receipts, and send it
to accounting, where the whole thing had to be re-keyed. Now, through the web portal, it’s already done the first time, the data
is living in the system. It’s just a huge time savings.”
AWF is also using the Serenic and the expense portal to automate credit card
reconciliation. Finance downloads records monthly from their credit card
provider, then uploads the data to Serenic. “Then every month, all card holders
have an expense report generated for them by Serenic -with all the transaction
dates and amounts and all that information already there,” says Jeff. “And
we’ve even created a process to furnish the account code it should go to. So
all they have to do is collect their receipts and select the budget line.”
An assistant scans in the receipts, and from there, the rest of the approval
process is automated - there’s no physical paper being tracked or moved. “And
since we’re not all in one place - but all over Africa and Washington,” Jeff
observes, “moving paper around is not only a pain, it can be really expensive.”
Grant Restriction Dimension
The majority of AWF’s funding comes in grants and donations from the US and
European governments, foundations, and individual donors. “The grants are
generally based on proposals we’ve sent out,” says Jeff. “The proposals lay out
what we plan to do, and how we plan to use any funds.” And the funds normally
come with restrictions that stipulate they’re spent according to certain
aspects of that proposal.
“That’s how we’ve used the dimension code in Serenic’s Award Vision. Each
restriction is basically a promise to a donor about how we’ll use their funds -
and we’re accountable on that. So we code each restriction in as an award
restriction,” says Jeff. “And we budget based on that.”
“We can really track grant-by-grant each commitment we’ve made for every dollar we budget.”
“And another thing that’s good in Serenic,” he says, “is the way CBS
structured the award restriction dimension with us. Now when staff enters against that award
dimension, we’ve already layered in geography codes - which tell me where the
activity is taking place - and an activity code, which categorizes what kind of
thing that is. They just enter the award restriction, and it automatically
fills in that information that I need for my financial statements without
burdening staff with having to deal with a bunch of different codes.”
Multiple Currencies
AWF works in 11 African countries, plus the United States and the UK, pays
vendors in Europe, and has employees based in Europe. They are dealing with
more than a dozen currencies a day, which makes it critical that they have the
ability to conduct transactions in those currencies. “The US pays grants in US
dollars,” says Jeff, “but those grants are going to be implemented across
Africa in various currencies. And then, we have to convert it all back to
report it in US dollars. On top of that, grants come in different currencies.
While grants may come in Euros, we report that internally in US dollars and
then issue donor reports back in Euros. We even have a donor who makes grants
in Kenyan shillings. Since we’re
US-based, we must have the US Dollar as our base, but it’s absolutely critical
to have other currencies - and award currencies. I’ve never seen a product that
can handle that outside of Serenic.”
About our Partner: Capital Business Solutions
“Capital Business Solutions? We’ve just had such a great experience with
them,” says Jeff. “They’ve helped us find so many ways we can use the greatest
strengths in Serenic. Their training is so good; we’ve flown them to Nairobi to
help train in our staff there. They engaged right from the start to find ways
to use the system the way AWF works - and that was key.”