Customer case study: The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN)
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Background:
Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland along with an office based in Washington, DC, GAIN has offices in countries with high levels of malnutrition conditions: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Tanzania. To support work in those countries, GAIN needed a financial management solution that was designed to meet the unique needs of a multi-national nongovernmental organization (NGO) along with managing global programs, a multitude of funding sources, and complex budgeting and reporting needs.
Serenic Navigator:
GAIN chose Serenic Navigator due to the solution’s NGO focus and supporting applications including, fund management, budget and expense control, advanced allocation management, multi-currency management and award management. GAIN is currently using each of these functional areas within the latest version of the solution and continues to roll out Serenic Navigator to its field offices.
From a day-to-day operational view, GAIN relies on Serenic Navigator to manage financial activity associated with over 60 active funding sources in 13 counties while transacting business in 15 different currencies.
How Serenic Navigator Has Helped GAIN:
Serenic Navigator has dramatically improved the productivity of GAIN staff since taking the solution live. The time required to close out a given accounting period has dropped by at least 2 days. Before implementing Serenic Navigator, revenue recognition was a manual process, and with 60 active funding sources, managing the associated grants/awards took a significant amount time and was prone to numerous errors. By utilizing Serenic Navigator’s batch allocation functions GAIN is able to leverage actual salary and fringe costs rather than standardized costs based on estimates. This not only means that the financials are accurate, but general audit and numerous donor audits are greatly simplified, helping to ensure that the organization is operating within local cost management standards and donor requirements.
GAIN also uses the Serenic Navigator allocations management capability, which are used extensively during data entry to distribute various costs on specific transactions before posting, saving valuable processing time while improving data accuracy.
Like many nonprofits, GAIN must not only audit its own financials but must provide financial information to be audited by the organization’s various funders. Each of these funders maintain unique reporting standards and program management guidelines, including different fiscal year-end calendars.
After implementing Serenic Navigator, each grant is now easily managed based on the correlating fiscal calendar required by the funder. Serenic Navigator’s Award Management further supports the management of grants through the activation of key functions such as funder spending restrictions, milestone reporting, award budgets and sub-awards.
In addition to complying with the terms of each grant, GAIN uses Serenic Navigator to create reports of all grants from a given funder, with the added ability to show its financial performance on a global scale. This capability would not be possible if each grant were treated separately in a “siloed” data repository.
stated Dale Cockman, Head of GAIN US and Senior Manager for Financial Systems & Reporting. |  |
GAIN makes extensive use of many Serenic Navigator features such as budget plans and budget ledger. GAIN can define sub-plans, track the progress and status of multiple budgets simultaneously, and allows adjustments to posted budgets within Serenic Navigator.
Dale Cockman commented,
“What’s great is our budget preparers can easily access current and archival budget versions when forecasting or when measuring program performance.”
Recently GAIN decided to replace their bespoke procurement system and chose to use the procurement within Serenic Navigator.
Dale Cockman stated,
“The robust and flexible workflows, ease of automation, and global accessibility of the platform made it the obvious choice.”
Serenic Navigator further enables project accounting functions, including projects supported by multiple funding sources which each bring their own compliance requirements. Serenic took on the responsibility of advising GAIN on best practices when it comes to the management of grants and projects through the use of Serenic Navigator financial reporting dimensions.
“Serenic people are always on it and they don’t give up. They’re creative and passionate about what they do whether its support, project or implementers or leadership,”
said Dale Cockman.
More About GAIN: The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition is an international organisation launched at the United Nations in 2002, headquartered in Geneva. We also have offices in Bangladesh, Denmark, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mozambique, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.
GAIN participates in global discussions in an effort to shape and direct the international community to fund and act to improve food systems everywhere.
About Serenic Navigator & Sylogist
Sylogist is a public sector SaaS company that provides comprehensive ERP, CRM, fundraising, education administration, and payments solutions that allow its customers to carry out their missions.
Sylogist serves over 1,950 customers globally, including all levels of government, nonprofit and non-governmental organizations, educational institutions, and public compliance-driven and funded companies.
Serenic Navigator, brought to you by Sylogist, is a pioneering fund accounting software solution for nonprofits, NGOs, K-12 Schools, Government, faith-based and religious institutions.Serenic Navigator has offers fund accounting, deposits and loans, grant and award management, budget management, payroll and human services, data integration, and analytics and reporting.
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