Red Carpet Ask Me Anything: Sharon From The Wilderness Society

#1

TWS-ANR

Hi there! I’m Sharon, Sr. Director of Budget, Grants Management, Systems & Analysis at The Wilderness Society. And this is my Prophix Red Carpet Ask Me Anything!

I work with rescue horses. And I have two rescued dogs: Teddy, a mutt, and Reese, a golden-shepherd.

Dogs%20for%20Red%20Carpet

Since 1935, The Wilderness Society has led the effort to permanently protect 109 million acres of wilderness in 44 states. We have been at the forefront of nearly every major public lands victory. Our organization is headquartered in Washington, DC.

Using Microsoft Excel in combination with Microsoft Dynamics SL wasn’t cutting it for our budgeting back in 2011, so we implemented Prophix. Since our initial implementation, we have expanded our Prophix uses to include forecasting, reporting, financial consolidation, personnel planning, project planning, revenue planning, and cash flow planning.

We’re a not-for-profit, so we track revenue by funder and labor costs by individual. We monitor budgets to actuals and see where we are relative to our net targets, rather than focus on hitting our revenue and expense forecasts.

Being able to re-forecast after Q1 has enabled us to reallocate budget towards travel, hiring contractors, and prioritizing conservation projects or other discretionary spending. Some of these initiatives are tied to our revenue goals.

We receive restricted funds from foundations, private donors, and corporations, who wish to address one or more of our three pillars:

  1. Land and water
  2. Energy and climate
  3. People outdoors

As one example, restricted funds can only go towards preserving public lands from potential industrial damage or ensuring wilderness protections. We’ll then show donors the dollars they’ve spent and the narrative tied to their donations based on financial data that flows through Prophix.

We moved to the Prophix Cloud in 2018. I used to be a programmer, so I found the process to be relatively easy. It was simple for me to create the data imports, bringing the actuals into Prophix. Migrating data from our legacy system to the cloud was easy as well. Overall, this took us about a month. At the Prophix Conference in 2019, I learned that I could have had a working version of the original budget; I didn’t need different versions for each year. So I would advise Prophix customers not to build so many different budget versions. You won’t need different versions, you can just use the time dimension to view the budget across different years.

I have a poll question for you!

Do any of you who are non-profit customers of Prophix use the software for grant management?

  • Yes
  • No
  • N/A

0 voters

Now it’s your turn. Ask me anything! About Prophix, my dogs, not-profit-finance, or life in DC. Let’s learn from each other.

#2

I work for a non-profit social service agency in Syracuse, NY. Our budget process is decentralized. I have eight manager who participate in the budget process. We have many staff that are allocated to many departments. In DPM the allocation process is not intuitive and requires training staff. Do you have this situation and if so how did you deal with it.

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#3

Hi Sharon,

We have not switched to the cloud as of yet. One of the concerns with switching is the mandatory updates. We are afraid it will take away valuable time from end users to complete their budgets. At the moment we are able to hold off any upgrades until after budget season. Did you have any issues with upgrades? What has your experience with the cloud been since implementing?

Thanks!

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#4

I actually use a standard cube for staff time allocations, not DPM. I’ve been looking at moving to DPM for more of a position management purpose, but for now keeping track of staff time allocations to various projects, etc., is done in a cube I call “Workplan Allocator”. I keep track of current staff, open positions, and planned positions for budgeted salary and time allocations across landscapes, programs. Then I use the same cube and an various infoflex processes to allocate payroll expense for each employee using the cube. We do exception-based time reporting in ADP, so I needed a way to allocate salary expense by person to where their time is allocated. Managers supply me time allocations for their staff by quarter using a template. I did originally look at using DPM, but it seemed overkill for what I was trying to accomplish.

#5

System updates are usually scheduled during non-work hours so we’ve had no issues.

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#6

Hi Sharon,

How old are your dogs? I have 3 of my own. The oldest is a 13 year old Golden/chow mix rescue and is the sweetest dog ever.

#7

The smaller one, Teddy, is about 9 year old, and Reese is 10. 13! You are a good doggy Dad. That’s a long life for a Golden/Chow!

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#8

Do you use Prophix for any asset management? or what is the most unique thing you have used Prophix for to date? thanks

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#9

We don’t, Amie. The most unique thing we use Prophix for is processing our payroll expense files through it to allocate staff salaries according to time allocations we maintain in Prophix. Managers allocate staff time to various combinations of landscapes and campaigns, but we only do exception time reporting in ADP. So we needed some way to take the employees’ salary every two weeks and allocate it where it belongs. I then export that data from Prophix and use it to create a journal entry in our accounting software.

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#10

We currently create a version for each budget year and once budget is finalized, we InfoFlex the data to our Master Budget version, which contains budget all of our budgets. Sounds like all your budgets are in one version now?

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#11

Almost. I have a “Working Version” which is always my latest version for each fiscal year. A typical fiscal year for us will have the original budget and one reforecast. Then I have another version for storing original budgets for each fiscal year. We have a couple of years where we actually reforecasted more than once, so I have a version 3 and 4 which holds the extra versions for those anomalous years.

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#12

What’s the most unique way that your organization uses Prophix?

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#13

See my answer to Amie’s question.

#14

We currently switched our financial system to Workday. We were told that the 2 products could talk to each other and that we would be able to run allocations in Prophix and upload to Workday. We are having a lot of issues getting this to work. Do you have any experience or know anyone that uses Prophix with Workday ERP?

#15

Hello!

I’m wondering how engaged your end users are in the budgeting process and month end process? How many end users do you have? Do you have anything specific in place to encourage them to explore the software more?

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#16

No, sorry, I don’t. Are you just using flat files to transfer the data from Prophix to Workday or do you have something in between the two systems which allows them to talk to each other?

#17

Hi Emily. We actually ended up pulling back access to Prophix to end users. Because our end users were only in and actually using Prophix to enter budgets once a year, and just for non-labor line items (the labor budget is managed by me), we found we had to retrain everyone every year. Plus, the way budgets are built for the next fiscal year are very different, depending on the department. For some departments, I supply them with a few years worth of data from Prophix, along with details on their discretionary spending (pulled from our ERP), and give them an Excel file to enter the next fiscal year’s budget based on all that data. Then I import that data into Prophix. Our conservation business units build complex spending plans with lots of explanation and text, and then the budget manager for that team translates those spending plans into a simple Excel file I then import into Prophix. Budget to actuals monthly reporting comes out of Prophix each month, but our end users really like Excel pivot tables, so me and my teammate pull the data from Prophix, create the pivot tables for managers, and then e-mail them their reports. Not the most elegant solution, but my end users are really happy.

#18

How many users are interacting with Prophix, Offline Templates etc in this model?
(Thanks for sharing with us!)

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#19

When we first implemented, about 25 users. Since we centralized everything back in Finance, only 2.

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#20

How many Prophix Admins do you have and how do you share budgeting responsibilities among the Finance team?

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