HighRidge Church Graduates to Intacct for Flexible Financial Management and Accounting in the Cloud

Rapidly Growing Church Gains Financial Transparency and Real-Time Insight to Guide Long-Term Planning

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Oct 28, 2014, 08:45 ET

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 28, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Intacct, a leader in cloud financial management and accounting software, today announced that HighRidge Church has implemented Intacct to help scale its financial processes and create a forward-looking, real-time view of financial data. By leveraging Intacct to eliminate cumbersome, error-prone spreadsheet work, the nonprofit's finance team is saving over 400 hours of work each year, while gaining valuable financial insights that empower the church's leadership to make better informed decisions.

Founded in 2007, HighRidge Church is based in Fort Worth, Texas, and services 1,500 regular weekend worshipers and employs over sixty-five people. This dynamic growth requires the organization's leaders to closely monitor and plan around the finances of each ministry area it operates, such as children, hospitality, youth, worship, etc. To meet this need, HighRidge decided to replace its QuickBooks accounting software with a solution that could more easily track restricted funds, monitor actuals-to-budget by department, and provide flexible management reporting for ministry leaders, executive staff, and the church's board of elders.

"We chose Intacct over Shelby Systems and ACS Technologies because it delivers everything we wanted – reliable dimensional reporting, with scalability for future growth in an easily accessible cloud environment," said Kelly Miller, director of finance at HighRidge Church. "We also appreciate that Intacct is backed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), and we like its seamless upgrades that happen behind the scenes without draining resources from our IT department."

HighRidge worked with Intacct business partner DaVee Consulting (now part of AcctTwo) to streamline and modernize the faith-based nonprofit's revenue accounting, accounts payable, budgeting, and reporting processes with Intacct. Since then, Intacct has saved the organization's lean finance department over sixty hours per year by eliminating the use of spreadsheets for reconciling its Community Church Builder (CCB) church management software with QuickBooks. Today, HighRidge can easily import deposits from CCB directly into Intacct and automatically reconcile them with its bank accounts instead of manually entering all of this transactional data into multiple systems.

For its accounts payable, the church imports detailed bills from insurance providers as well as purchases from eleven credit card holders into Intacct, where anyone can easily drill-down to view specific transaction details as needed. This is a big improvement over HighRidge's previous process of tediously entering credit card transactions into an Excel spreadsheet and then again into its General Ledger, which used to take around thirty hours each month.

The combination of Intacct and the organization's new MartusPlanner tool for web-based, team-led budgeting also transformed the church's complicated, error-prone process of having department leaders each fill in financial plan spreadsheets for consolidation, iterations, and adjustments. With an automated, simple process, ministry leaders feel increased ownership and accountability. And when the budget cycle is complete, HighRidge benefits from Intacct's ability to simply pull in and report on team and organization-wide budgets from MartusPlanner.

In addition to these productivity improvements, one of the biggest impacts Intacct has had on the church is improved financial visibility. "Before, our accounting data was focused on the past and its reliability was questionable. Sometimes the information wasn't even relevant anymore by the time our reports were available," said Miller. "With Intacct's flexible, multi-dimensional reporting, our department heads are able to view pertinent real-time data from their desk, home, or even an iPad, which helps them better plan events and activities within the scope of their ministry budgets."

Previously, HighRidge used Excel for certain reports that were not available in QuickBooks, and data was sometimes manipulated incorrectly due to human error. Now, its accounting team can easily customize reports for comparisons across key dimensions – like departments, accounts, vendors, locations, or classes – right within Intacct, thus increasing the reliability and timeliness of the information. For example, the church's board of elders receives a customized weekly report to monitor the financial status of the nonprofit, which is helping them make critical decisions as HighRidge moves into the next phase of a major capital project.

"My favorite thing about using Intacct is the collaboration it enables around our financial planning, reporting, and evaluation of how we steward the finances of the church," concluded Miller. "Accounting is no longer a single department reporting historical data, rather we are a team working in real-time with our ministry leaders to produce the best results possible in order to move the organization forward."

Additional Resources:

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About Intacct
Intacct is the cloud financial management company. Bringing cloud computing to finance and accounting, Intacct's award-winning applications are the preferred financial applications for AICPA business solutions. Intacct accounting software, in use by more than 8,500 organizations from startups to public companies, is designed to improve company performance and make finance more productive. Hundreds of leading CPA firms and Value Added Resellers also offer Intacct to their clients. The Intacct system includes accounting, cash management, purchasing, vendor management, financial consolidation, revenue recognition, project accounting, fund accounting, inventory management, and financial reporting applications, all delivered over the Internet via cloud computing.

Intacct is headquartered in San Jose, California. For more information, please visit www.intacct.com or call 877-437-7765. Connect with Intacct on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube.

Intacct and the Intacct logo are trademarks of Intacct Corporation. All other company and product names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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