On-premises legacy systems being used by The Reach For A Dream Foundation, dedicated to children with life-threatening illnesses, were limiting its operations. Upgrades, downtime, remote access, performance, maintenance, high costs were challenges. Implementation of Sage Intacct cloud has improved reconciliations, reports and dashboards, and decision making.
Founded 36 years ago, The Reach For A Dream Foundation is committed to bringing dreams to life for children with life-threatening illnesses. By fulfilling six dreams daily, it provides these young dreamers with hope and a reason to look forward to tomorrow. Each dream experience is designed to build courage and offer joy, reminding children and their families that anything is possible.
Throughout the year, Reach For A Dream hosts several signature events to raise funds and awareness. These include Slipper Day, a playful event on the last Friday of May where participants, from schoolchildren to corporate executives, don slippers to support our cause. The annual golf days and participation in the 947 Cycle Challenge with Dream Riders team are pivotal in uniting communities to help fulfil children’s dreams.
There are numerous ways to support the mission, from volunteering and engaging in corporate social investment projects to donating Voyager Miles or making a monthly contribution. Supporters can also link their My School My Village My Planet cards to benefit the foundation directly and donations are eligible for tax certificates.
Reach For A Dream core operations involve identifying eligible children through collaborations with families, hospitals, and social workers. The foundation coordinates logistics and resources to realise these dreams, which range from trips and celebrity meetings to other unique experiences.
This is achieved with the support of sponsors and through organising events, campaigns, and partnerships that raise the necessary funds for dream fulfilment. These efforts are central to providing hope and joy to the children and their families.
Legacy systems and pain points
The Reach for a Dream Foundation previously used an on-premises financial system hosted on a server which made remote access challenging. Upgrades were painful as system downtime had to be scheduled until the upgrade was completed. With poor integration capabilities with other systems, expensive work arounds had to be implemented to connect to other systems.
Performance was an issue as the database transactions volumes increased.
Costs increased higher than expected for maintenance of the infrastructure and IT application support.
The legacy system did not have a direct integration into the bank account for automatic reconciliation so transactions had to be manually captured and reconciled. It had limited reporting capabilities leading to extraction of the data to compile manual reports.
According to Netesh Maharajh, Director, ALNET Technologies, African enterprises face multiple challenges from legacy solutions that impact their business operations and processes.
Scalability is by far the most important factor for any growing African business which hinders business expansion and adaptability to market changes by not implementing newer IT applications and IT infrastructure.
Security based on legacy IT applications and IT infrastructure become susceptible to security breaches and cyber threats.
On-going maintenance costs with outdated systems and infrastructure can be expensive from a resource and technology perspective especially with the availability of advance technology platforms in this new era.
Data analytics are not supported in legacy IT systems which hinders the business to have the ability to report on data insights to make effective decisions.
Speed and agility are another critical important factor in legacy IT applications and IT infrastructure that contribute to slower response times to customers which ultimately hinders business operations.
Legacy IT systems can be very rigid which makes it difficult for the business to implement new processes or innovate leading to inefficiencies in the business operations and lack of integration capabilities with modern technologies.
Poor user experience plays another important role in a business which ultimately affects the staff’s satisfaction, performance and productivity.
For African enterprises, wishing to modernise, new technology platforms which include Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning provide a more structured approach resulting in time and cost savings for businesses.
Implementation of Sage Intacct
ALNET Technologies, a Sage Platinum Business Partner, was selected by Reach For A Dream to implement Sage Intacct, a best of breed cloud finance software solution.
In general, ALNET Technologies follows a well-defined approach to migrate data from on-premises to a modern cloud solution.
Assessment and planning is done to assess the current data state on the existing infrastructure and what is required to be migrated. Validation of the current data and quality of the data. How much of data is required to be migrated and the feasibility of around cost saving and improved scalability.
Data Mapping and preparation to identify the type of data required for the migration and how this maps to the modern cloud solution. Data cleansing exercises to eliminate duplicates and inaccuracies.
Migration options on which tools are selected to perform the migration such as template driven files, automated data flows such as ETL for the data transformation to the cloud solution.
Identifying any integration and third party applications required and selecting the appropriate integration medium used such as API, middleware applications and any automated workflows.
Once the above stages have been identified and agreed upon with the end user enterprise, the migration plan is executed.
Migration testing is performed with subsets of data especially in a financial application to run financial reporting to validate monthly and yearly balances and related master datasets based on pre migration and post migration comparisons for completeness.
Change management
According to ALNET’s Maharajh, change management is the most critical element when migrating to a cloud solution and must include stakeholder management during the early stages to build support and guidance to the team members and create the awareness and efficiencies by migrating to the modern cloud solution.
It is important to establish a well-structured customised role-based training plan that will allow the users to be engaged in a practical training environment based on the business processes.
Introduction of user acceptance training and testing is done to ensure that all processes are accommodated and addressing any issue that may be encountered and resolved accordingly. User satisfaction is the ultimate goal by creating a smooth and exciting journey to ensure that the user is well equipped during the go live stages.
ALNET provided role-based training for the Reach for a Dream team based on each team member’s processing responsibility on the system. The training was conducted in various sessions to accommodate each members availability. The ALNET team provided further hand holding sessions as part of their user acceptance testing to assist the Reach for a Dream users process more confidently on the system to achieve the ultimate objectives.
Benefits, gains and IT maturity
Sage Intacct has improved processing efficiencies across multiple areas for The Reach For A Dream Foundation. This was from processing donor invoices, tracking dream costs for dreamers at branch level and reducing the challenges around bank reconciliations. The pre-defined reports and dashboards provides real-time financial data overview on one screen with drill-downs, thus allowing visibility into financials to help make better, data-driven decisions.
The Foundation’s van Huyssteen says the system’s potential to provide near live information is a great advantage. This assists the business to analyse data and make meaningful business decisions.
Typically, an enterprise that has a clear objective on cloud technology adoption and its benefits such as scalability, cost-efficiency, flexibility are prepared for migration, indicates ALNET’s Maharajh.
Companies that foster a culture of innovation and technology adoption are generally more open to cloud technology and are more likely to succeed in migrating to a cloud financial solution.
Enterprises with strong leadership support for digital transformation, innovation and adoption of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are more geared towards cloud solutions, understanding the advantages and efficiencies that will streamline the operations with scalability and flexibility that it offers.
Snapshot of Sage Intacct
Financial dashboards
- Dashboards and reporting gives you real-time visibility into your business financials to help you make better, data-driven decisions.
- Customisable dashboards allow role-based and process- based metrics, reports, and charts to be created for quick insights
Procure to Pay
- Streamline your purchasing process with controls and manage your supplier payments.
- Create configurable workflows to enhance internal controls for accountability
- Approvals with Delegation of Authority
- Set expense limits to maintain budget compliance
- Gain visibility on AP transactions in real-time
- Automate your AP payment approvals process
Quote to Cash
- Streamline your Accounts Receivables management by automating the invoices and collections process
- Single view of all your quotes, sales orders and invoices
- Automatically posts transactions into your general ledger
- Gain visibility of your customers outstanding invoices
- Enhance internal controls for collections
- Analyse customer payment trends for quick decisions
- Save time and increase cashflow more efficiently
Cash Management
- Reduce your bank reconciliation time with Sage Banking cloud services and update your financials in real-time.
- Connect to your Bank using Sage Banking Cloud Services
- Automated reconciliations with online and import capabilities
- Apply and record payments using matching rules
- Reduce audit risks – spot exceptions, manage errors, monitor fraud and maintain accurate balances
- Manage multiple bank accounts across multiple locations and entities
