“We are losing a day a week to 2 full days on data entry” Program manager at a Nonprofit

Agencies receiving grants or fee-for-service contracts are required to share data with the city, state, or local funders. This data may be sent in a spreadsheet or by directly entering it in the funder database. In many cases, the Nonprofit may use their own database (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.) to facilitate centralized intake and services resulting in staff manually duplicating the data between systems. Some funder systems allow uploads, however aggregating, deduplicating, and massaging data takes significant time. In addition, most nonprofits have multiple funding streams, each with its own reporting requirement which exacerbates the problem.

An organization that we were interviewing last week mentioned that their program staff spends 20-30% of their time doing redundant data entry. There is obviously a direct cost implication of this redundancy since time = $, however, there are other, more significant side-effects. Social sector employees are passionate about the missions of their organizations which is why they join these nonprofits. However, soon enough the need to document work in multiple places starts to compete with the mission, creating issues with staff retention. Bottom line – you can’t hire smart people and expect them to work on mundane tasks day in and day out! Also, any time spent on repetitive data entry is time not spent with a client that needs assistance. 

After encountering this issue for more than a decade working with various nonprofit customers, our team decided to take it head-on. What has resulted, is a secure, new way to automate tedious data entry to and from a funder system. What makes this solution unique is that it does not need programmatic or administrative access to the funder system. Mundane tasks such as copying/pasting and uploading data can now be completely eliminated, with the program team able to dedicate more time helping their clients, directly impacting the organization’s mission and its bottom line.

Our solution is currently being offered at an affordable monthly cost including support, plus a one-time implementation fee. Please contact us here for a demo.

Sandeep Banga is the CEO of Acutedge.