School’s financial team builds a process
everyone can count on with trusted software

Located in Pioneer Valley, minutes away from five Western Massachusetts
colleges, Williston Northampton School offers uncommon opportunities to
its 502 middle and high school students, with two thirds boarding at the
historic school, which dates to 1841.

For more than two decades, Chief Financial Officer Charles McCullagh has
used Blackbaud’s accounting software to help track and share the school’s
finances. In fact, he implemented an earlier generation of Blackbaud
software not long after arriving at the school in 1999, having used Blackbaud
at his previous workplace. He still looks back with surprise that—prior to
adopting Blackbaud software for essential systems of record—Williston Northampton had been relying on a financial system that could not
produce financial statements.

“We must be able to hand the board a balance sheet, a statement of
activities, and a budget to actual report,” he said.

With Financial Edge NXT and strong institutional discipline, McCullagh and
his team have long had numbers they can rely on for transparent reporting
and setting strategic goals. “You have to set up your general ledger so it can
tell a story,” McCullagh said. “As long as you can think like that and you have
the accounting system set up to do that, then it’s healthy.”

Streamlining Reconciliation

The school realizes further benefits by using Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT,
the leading software for fundraising and relationship management, which
integrates by design with Financial Edge NXT.

When Deborah Lennon, the school’s Director of Finance and Auxiliary
Operations, started at the school in 2007, she saw the advantages of
integration and set up a reconciliation process with her counterpart on the
school’s advancement team to eliminate the duplicative data entry that she
knows other schools still grapple with.

“The automated integration between Financial Edge NXT and Raiser’s Edge
NXT saves me a ton of time,” Lennon said.

Williston Northampton’s financial team sticks to a routine monthly
reconciliation that includes all school accounts, rather than waiting until
the end of the quarter or year’s end for what can sometimes be a lengthy,
inefficient reconciliation that requires hashing over outdated transactions for
days, if not weeks.

“The reporting features in Blackbaud are user friendly, intuitive, and
informative,” Lennon added. “Being able to use detailed general ledger
reports along with statement of functional expense reports provides
budget managers both detail and summary information that allows them to
see their activity and use these tools to make spending decisions for their
department, while working towards staying within their budget for the year.
In turn, this helps the school overall with fiscal year budgeting and spending.”
Williston Northampton is a school, not a business, McCullagh said. Yet it
has business-like activities that need to be reported on to departments and
other stakeholders in a reliable and timely way. “With Financial Edge NXT,
the reports are set up in such a way that you get what you need almost
immediately,” he said.

Tailoring Reports for Different Audiences

Using Financial Edge NXT, the school’s finance team can create a summary
of activity that’s tailored to a specific audience and drill into deeper levels
of details easily through choices on a dropdown menu in the Visual Chart
Organizer. Exporting the relevant information to an Excel spreadsheet for
further sharing is easy, too. “It takes no time at all. It’s pretty simple to do,”
Lennon said.

That means the financial team can quickly respond to expense questions
from school department heads with specifics—or show prospective and
engaged donors exactly how the school uses restricted funds. McCullagh
explained: “If a donor asks, ‘How are you going to use my money?’ we can run
a report right now and say, ‘This is how we drew money last year out of the
restricted funds, and this is how we allocated the earnings or losses for the
year.’ We can show this in detail, even in monthly increments.”

They can also effectively answer to the Board of Trustees, which is always
focused on the financial needs of the school in the strategic planning
process. McCullagh has worked with many boards through the years and
understands the trustees have high expectations of the financial team. He
also knows his team will confidently meet those expectations with reporting
that’s accurate, easy to follow, and insightful.

“We have put in place a strong system that takes advantage of the
capabilities of Blackbaud’s software for financial accounting and fundraising,”
McCullagh said, “and it works beautifully.”