Easter Seals of South Carolina runs a lean operation, dedicating as much of their budget as possible to the communities they serve. For example, the organization dispensed with their offices about five years ago, according to Ellen Staubach, Director of Finance and Human Resources. “We have about 125 people working for us and they all work from their homes” says Ellen. “Because the services Easter Seals provides are in our clients’ homes, it didn’t make sense to have buildings that required expensive overhead. As a non-profit, we prefer to dedicate that money to services.”
And when it comes to their IT needs, she says CBS has been a critically important partner in Easter Seals’ efforts to be as efficient as possible. Easter Seals of South Carolina has relied on Capital Business’ software – both Drillpoint Reports and Paypoint – as well as their professional services and training. “We’re all about saving money,” Ellen explains, “I can promise you that.”
The money Easter Seals of South Carolina saves in overhead goes to help serve roughly 2000 children and their families every year. “Our mission is to provide services to children with disabilities and special needs so they have equal opportunity to live, learn, work and play in their communities. The most important time, as our new slogan says, is the first five years. That’s when a child needs the most help and the most assistance to get past any special delays they may have,” she says. “And there are more people on waiting lists. There’s a lot of services we’d love to be able to furnish and more clients we’d love to serve – because it more than pays for itself in the long run. I’m excited about what we do and I love it.”
The first major savings Capital Business enabled Ellen to make was when she was evaluating Easter Seals financial solution – Sage Fund Accounting. “When I looked at our financial software, I found we’d were pretty much the record holder for organizations that had been continuously using Sage MIP Fund Accounting – it had been something like 20 plus years. I knew Sage Fund Accounting, and knew it was good software, but to be honest – we had 20 years worth old data and it was a mess.”
Realizing that her solution was hopelessly mired in a mess of legacy data, she called Capital Business. “I said I have this software and I like it, but it’s going to drive me crazy. I can’t get it to work properly anymore. And instead of trying to sell us a new software package, they said ‘Why buy new software when you already own this? We’ll install a new instance of the current version, move over new data and vendors you’re currently using – and you can have the old version and the new version. The old data is right there, and the new data is right there. And my response was, ‘You’re a genius.’ And in the end, I didn’t have to buy any new software – which saved us a lot of money. They came down and installed it, and it was perfect.” Ellen estimates that in this case Capital Business Solutions helped save Easter Seals tens of thousands of dollars.
Drillpoint
Ellen – who is not only the Finance and HR director, but also wears many hats such as CPR trainer and IT support person – is always looking for ways to fit more productivity into her busy day. “I was spending probably four days a month just on financial reports,” she says. “The financial statements in Sage are great, but they weren’t exactly in the format that we wanted. So I called CBS and explained the issue I was having in Sage, and he said, you know what we have Drillpoint and it will do it for you – and when he told me the price and I said, ‘I’m all over that.’ And then he told me the benefits of it, such as I only have to tell it the date and click the button, and boom there’s my financial statement, and I got really excited. It is extremely easy to use.”
And with Drillpoint, she has reduced the time she spends on financial reports from about four days a month to less than a single day. “I’m running six or seven different financial statements, one for each individual program director, and they love it.”
And generating the kinds of reports she needs is only one of the ways Drillpoint has saved time – she now spends less time checking and correcting the reports. For instance, if she were to see that general management had an expense item that didn’t make any sense, she can work out how the error happened and get it fixed – quickly. “So when I see a problem, I click the on the dollar amount and it instantly shows me where I might have made an incorrect journal entry. I don’t have to spend a lot of time doing a search to find the error. I can find it and fix it right away. When you’ve been doing it as long as I have, you can look at a number and see it looks wrong – so wow, being able to just click on it and see where it came from is incredible. It used to take me so long – going back and forth between the GL and then redoing the financials, then looking, then going back. It was so time consuming – and my time is extremely valuable. I cram a lot into a day and I want to spend as little time on data entry for the financial statement as I have to. I know it’s important, and I know it has to be accurate, and I feel very comfortable with Drillpoint.”
And on top of that, she can now present the reports in more useful and attractive formats. “With Drillpoint, I can make it look pretty, I don’t have to go just with the standard boring financial statement. I can use any different format Excel allows.”
Paypoint
In the last five years, Ellen has seen the Easter Seals of South Carolina team grow from about 60 employees to 125. Payroll went from being a minor headache to a major challenge. “We’d gotten rid of our building, so each and every employee is working remotely. Which means each of them needs to get their paystub delivered to them on pay date but at 125 different locations. And when you add up all the different costs of snail mail – the time, the postage, the paper, the toner, the envelopes – and doing all of that twice a month, it gets expensive. Plus, if you’re using snail mail, you never know how long it may take for an employee to get their check stub.”
Ellen asked Capital Business Solutions if there weren’t someway to automate all that. “So I said, you know what? I know people who get their paystub instantly online. Isn’t there someway we can do this? They told me they had developed this solution, Paypoint – and it’s terrific. It’s saved me significant time and money. And our employees love it. I don’t understand smaller organizations who chose to outsource payroll. My payroll takes an hour at most. Now that I email stubs to everyone and everything is direct deposit, how easy could it be?”
Working with Capital Business Solutions
Ellen says that she has no doubt in her mind that working with Capital Business Solutions has saved her “a LOT of money, that they’ve saved me a LOT of time.” Not only did they save her replacing her Sage Fund Accounting software, and save her time and money with Drillpoint and Paypoint – they also gave her targeted training that helped her get the most out of her software in the briefest amount of time. “I knew Sage Fund Accounting pretty well, but they showed me some things I didn’t know that just saved me so much more time. Things I might have learned in a class – but I didn’t want to invest in going out-of-town for a four day class where they would cover things I didn’t need.”
Ellen only needed about one-day of training, which Capital Business Solutions provided on-site. “I knew a lot, so they brought just exactly the training I needed, just about the things I didn’t know. It was so efficient, I didn’t have to sit through a bunch of training on accounts receivable – I don’t have accounts receivable.”
According to Ellen, Capital Business Solutions stands out because they “don’t just speak IT. They speak accounting. They speak English. It’s fabulous. Their service is not to be believed. I really, really appreciate those guys. And they’re so customer service oriented, I’d recommend them to anyone. I just love anyone who can make my life easier and take unnecessary work off my plate to free up more of my time.”
