Creating change in the world

Charitable Impact was founded by John Bromley in 2011 to help Canadians create change in the world. As a public foundation that operates as a donor-advised fund, Charitable Impact allows its customers to manage their charitable giving from a single Impact Account. Through their services, over $660M was donated by the Charitable Impact Community of more than 110,000 people, benefiting over 9,000 charities across Canada.

Alicia Williams joined Charitable Impact in 2018, bringing over ten years of CPA and legal experience to the organization. In her new role as a Controller, Alicia spearheaded an organization-wide initiative to implement better controls and scalable processes over approvals and spending as the company grew. To support this initiative, Alicia started the search for the perfect spend management solution to strengthen the company's spend culture.

How Charitable Impact Got the Gift of Time with Procurify’s Purchasing System

Charitable Impact was a fast-growing software company, so Alicia knew that there was no room for outdated paper-based processes. Emails and spreadsheets had to be eliminated. She wanted the new system to be easy to use and intuitive for simple and rapid user adoption.

In addition, the solution had to support and make existing business processes more manageable. One of the challenges Alicia faced was going through the budgeting process. Budgeting was impossible without knowing exactly why, how, and when the spend was happening. Most spending was expense-based, dooming the company to adjust the budgets reactively.

Requests for spend and approvals were mainly verbal, relying on handshakes, leaving no paper or digital trail, and making month-end closing dreadfully long. The ideal solution included transparent approval workflows based on departments and dollar thresholds that could accurately reflect the budgets.

Other requirements included clear reporting around vendor information and managing the typical purchasing categories of a fast-paced software company, such as: 

• Software subscriptions and contracts with technology vendors 
• Office supplies and office event planning 
• Services (legal, facilities, sales, PR) 
• Individual expenses and travel, as well as credit card based spend. 

Charitable Impact needed a streamlined process to track purchases and proactively assess spend with a complete 3-way matching process for Alicia and the accounting team.

Challenges and requirements for the new spend management system

After one full year of Charitable Impact’s implementation of Procurify, here’s what Alicia has to say:

“Procurify has given our company more visibility into budgets and helped our management make better financial decisions in real-time. Automating expense reporting and purchasing approvals has been a key component to successfully managing financial information while working remotely.”

“Procurify has been an important part of automating our systems. During this time of COVID-19, its importance has been even more clear as all of our staff have been working remotely. Without Procurify, it would be much more challenging and time-consuming to process expense reimbursements and manage purchases.”

Solution: Implementing Procurify

As with most software companies, marketing spend is one of the biggest and hardest to control. To unleash the team’s creativity and make fast decisions, Charitable Impact’s marketing team needed a solution that would support marketing operations rather than slow it down.

Procurify allowed Charitable Impact to move faster, improve understanding of their budgets, and make smarter decisions. From full budget visibility to improved communication through integrated Slack notifications, the marketing team at Charitable Impact found it easier than ever to control recurring marketing spend, manage multiple vendors, organize events, and submit expenses.

“Being able to track spend in real-time allows you to make better decisions,” said Daniel Nielsen, Director of Marketing at Charitable Impact. “What I like is the simplicity of Procurify. You're just doing everything on the go. If you're meeting a client over a coffee, just take a picture of the receipt and off you go. You don't have to worry about the receipts with you, which tends to be a problem as we all know.”

Intuitive solution for all marketing expenses

For the past six years, Charitable Impact has held its annual flagship event, Tech Pong, a charity ping pong tournament and a digital tech party. More than 30 companies of all sizes from Vancouver, British Columbia rally around this tournament and raise money for the causes they believe through the Charitable Impact platform. As you can imagine, an event of this scale requires a lot of planning and precise execution.

“We have a huge flagship event every year called Tech Pong, which requires a lot of expenses and vendor management. That's our biggest Procurify rush of the year. We have to handle many different vendors and invoices coming in from all sides. So that's definitely an instance where the product makes a huge difference because the entire team has to keep track and manage many, many vendors at the same time,” - says Luisa Velez, Senior PR and Communications Manager at Charitable Impact.

The Procurify Team is honored to support Charitable Impact on its mission of creating a brighter future and creating impactful change in the world.  

ALICIA WILLIAMS

CONTROLLER, CHARITABLE IMPACT

Alicia Williams is a CPA and lawyer with over ten years of accounting experience, leading teams as a Controller and a CFO. She’s a results-driven executive with expertise in executing accounting, IT, and legal business strategies and projects. Since becoming Procurify’s customer in 2019, Alicia has been an active member of the Spend Culture Community, a series of events for fellow finance, operations, and procurement leaders who meet and share knowledge in an open and inclusive space. 

To see Alicia in action, check out our on-demand webinar, Controlling Budget Spending and Automating Approvals Through Procurify & QuickBooks.