Using Technology for Good: How a NetSuite Cloud ERP Implementation Helped a Nonprofit Accelerate its Mission

Enter Centric: A NetSuite Implementation Strategy to Meet Business Expansion and Financial Reporting Needs

To get started, our Centric team conducted an assessment at the Back2Back headquarters and listened to the challenges that the accounting, marketing and operations teams were facing. Centric helped Back2Back leaders navigate implementation meetings with the vendor and understand how NetSuite’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution could be optimized to streamline internal operations; in particular, the challenges related to donor relationship management and financial reporting.

During the implementation phase, the team configured NetSuite Cloud ERP to support Back2Back’s unique financial processes and enabled Back2Back to more efficiently report and automate income, expenditure and feedback processes.

Centric helped the Back2Back team import their financial and constituent records (along with historical data) through CSV imports while preserving mission-critical parent-child relationships in the data. Centric also helped to build out the reporting tools to ensure that timely reports could be delivered to constituents which detailed how donor funds were disbursed. After the system went live, our consultants worked directly with Back2Back staff, including the Accounting and Development groups, to train them on the new ERP system.

The Results: An ERP System That Provides Real-Time Visibility into Financial Information and Donor Profiles

With Centric’s help, Back2Back was able to optimize NetSuite to streamline their internal constituent management and financial reporting processes within a single application. Back2Back employees now have visibility into incoming donations and outgoing expenditures as well as access to ERP capabilities, providing a big picture, end-to-end view of their data and significantly increasing operational efficiency. In addition, financial information in NetSuite is always current which enables a real-time view for reporting.

“It’s been a real homerun on the reporting side,” said John Guckenberger, Back2Back’s US Operations Director. “The access to real-time data has made a huge impact on our enterprise resource planning and vastly improved our connections with donors. We are also much more efficient and prepared to sustain our growth, even with a relatively small staff.”

Rob Hall, Back2Back’s Ministry Advancement Director, also sees the implementation of NetSuite as a very positive development, since its 360-Degree Customer View feature enables employees to more efficiently personalize their communications with donors. This not only instills more confidence and trust in the organization, but it also allows them to place more focus on their growing organizational management and trauma training programs.

Karen Holliday, Back2Back’s Finance Coordinator for Donations, believes that the 360-Degree Customer View is helping to create and maintain bonds between employees and donors. One of the major challenges was the need to create a data model for donor and family relationships in the constituent database.

“Our staff and volunteers want to know donors personally, but as our donor base grows, this is becoming more challenging to accomplish organically,” she said. “At Back2Back, there are donor families that are three generations deep in the constituent database. Because Back2Back values building and maintaining relationships with our donors, it is critical to be able to understand those relationships in the constituent records.”

NetSuite’s 360-Degree Customer View feature enables staff to see all data and notes related to any donor and be able to ‘understand the donors’ (and donors’ families) perspective, their relationships with on-site staff, and their connections to the children benefiting from Back2Back’s services.

This ensures that correspondence is not duplicated and helps staff to maintain personalized relationships with their donor constituents. The organization has also seen the benefits of the 360-View through the story told by NetSuite’s integrated analytics. Since the deployment of NetSuite in 2017, Back2Back has greatly accelerated its donor-to-cash and financial close processes.

Looking Forward

Back2Back’s successful NetSuite implementation is an example of a nonprofit organization using cloud technology to optimize internal processes and expand its impact on the community it serves.

We aligned Back2Back’s people and processes with the enterprise reporting power of NetSuite, which has streamlined their internal donor management and financial reporting processes. The NetSuite implementation has improved donor relationship management and prepared this successful organization for future expansion.