Hundreds of NetSuite Corporate Citizenship Program Grantees Fuelled Their Missions and Improved Efficiency with Cloud Business Management in 2013
SAN MATEO, Calif.—January 29, 2014—NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced that more than four hundred organisations have benefited from NetSuite.org, including Good360, Healing Waters International, the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, the New Teacher Center and the San Francisco SPCA. These organisations leverage NetSuite software to conduct day-to-day back office operations like accounting, nonprofit business processes unique to their organisations and social impact reporting, as well as ERP, grants management and fundraising. They also benefit from unique grantee support programs like SuiteVolunteers that pair NetSuite employee teams with grantees to help grantees use the donated software more effectively through pro bono projects.
The ultimate goal of NetSuite corporate citizenship is to enable organisations to focus their resources more directly in service of their missions—education, global water sustainability, advocacy for the disabled, anti-poverty and anti-hunger programs, and many other—by improving internal efficiencies, reducing IT and administrative costs, and improving transparency and accountability to donors and stakeholders. NetSuite offers every qualified Organisation a five-user base donation valued in excess of $35,000 per year, including training and support. Additional services are available to grantees at deeply discounted rates.
In 2013, grantees achieved a wide variety of efficiency gains including:
In addition to software, NetSuite.org offered grantees 17 different types of SuiteVolunteer pro bono projects in the last year, providing assistance to grantees on topics from budgeting to email marketing to business process automation. Sixty grantees took advantage of these opportunities in 2013.
Since its founding in 2008, the NetSuite.org corporate citizenship program has empowered more than 400 nonprofits and social enterprises with tools to amplify their impact in making the world a better place. To learn more about NetSuite's corporate citizenship programs, please visit www.netsuite.org.
“Every day I learn how another grantee is amplifying their social impact with NetSuite—often innovating in ways our team never anticipated," said David Geilhufe, Director of NetSuite.org at NetSuite. "We are humbled by the achievements of our grantees across such a broad range of social areas. It's extremely gratifying to be able to support these organisations with our cloud business management platform and the amazing skills of NetSuite employees.”
The expanding number of charities and social enterprises powering their organisations with NetSuite include:
Good360 (www.good360.org), a product philanthropy nonprofit founded in 1983 that collects excess inventory from Fortune 500 companies for distribution to charities, is implementing NetSuite to replace a Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision) application that lacks scalability to accommodate growth of operations in North America and internationally, including a planned launch in Australia in the next year. Selected over SAP Business One, Sage and Microsoft Dynamics AX for a planned rollout in January 2014, NetSuite can give the Alexandria, Va.-based Organisation greater transparency into working with 125 corporate donors, including Home Depot, Dell, HP and UPS, and the 35,000 charities that received goods in 2012 with a fair market value of $350 million, including apparel, computers, office supplies and more. NetSuite Inventory Management can give Good360 real-time visibility and control over goods as they move from donor to warehouse to recipients, while NetSuite's cloud architecture enables the Organisation to avoid the expense of a full-time IT staffer and in-house server. The NetSuite back-end can support an expanded online marketplace designed for greater social collaboration as well as online ordering, with a Celigo connector between NetSuite and a Magento front end. “NetSuite can give us the transparency and scalability we need to grow quickly and internationally with less overhead,” said Shabab Gruberg, CIO of Good360. “Transparency and reporting are really key for us—understanding who we're helping, how we're helping, and how we can do greater social good.”
Healing Waters International (www.healingwaters.org), a Golden, Colo.-based nonprofit that supplies water treatment and filtration systems, as well as health and hygiene training, to communities in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central American, South America, and Africa, has improved the efficiency and effectiveness of both its headquarters and field operations with NetSuite OneWorld after upgrading from QuickBooks in 2007. NetSuite's global business management solution supports real-time financial visibility across three field offices, global financial consolidation and multi-currency transactions, improving transparency and enabling optimal resource allocation without the delays and guesswork of its previous system. With NetSuite, Healing Waters has reduced its IT support costs by 30 percent and gained flexibility for its continued expansion in Africa and planned expansion in Asia. Healing Waters has improved its visibility and control over inventory and assets at both headquarters and its Latin America offices, while the NetSuite Employee Center streamlines expense reporting for employees. “NetSuite has been able to accommodate everything we need on a global basis,” said John Correa, CFO of Healing Waters. “With NetSuite OneWorld, we can look at each general ledger from our field offices for a real-time view of where they are financially and report with a high degree of confidence on each project as to how funds are used. The flexibility that NetSuite gives us as a cloud-based system has been incredible.”
The Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (www.meltwater.org), a nonprofit school in Accra, Ghana that trains young Africans to become software developers and entrepreneurs, has improved its overall efficiency since implementing NetSuite in 2012 to replace Excel and paper-based processes. With that improvement, the school, founded and funded by the San Francisco-based Meltwater Group, a NetSuite partner with 20,000 customers and 27 offices around the world that supplies online intelligence solutions, is better able to focus resources on education. Since its founding in 2007, the Meltwater School has graduated 125 students who have gone on to launch 14 startups such as Saya, Retail Tower and Dropifi; many of those incubator companies also run NetSuite through NetSuite.org. In helping fund these start-ups, the Meltwater parent aims for a “big exit” acquisition to generate capital to expand the school in Ghana and other countries. NetSuite has given the Meltwater School a complete business platform covering student and employee records, financials, transactions and marketing, while providing real-time visibility for the U.S. parent not possible with the previous system. “The time savings achieved with NetSuite have been phenomenal,” said Rich Tanksley, Director of Operations at the Meltwater School. “Before, our parent would get month-old reports—now we have real-time visibility and the data we need to make decisions. NetSuite is an incredible asset and NetSuite.org has been extremely generous with us and our incubator companies.”
The New Teacher Center (NTC) (www.newteachercenter.org), a national nonprofit dedicated to improving student learning by training more than 25,000 teachers a year, is saving about $110,000 annually in hardware and administrative costs since upgrading to NetSuite from an opentaps accounting system in June 2012, and replacing Salesforce.com in July 2013. Selected over Intacct, Blackbaud Financial Edge and FinancialForce, NetSuite has enabled NTC to dramatically improve efficiency while supporting its growth goals of expanding its reach from 20 percent to 50 percent of the largest urban U.S. school districts, tripling the number of teachers engaged, and adding 100 new employees. With NetSuite, NTC, based in Santa Cruz, Calif., with offices in New York, Boston, Chicago, North Carolina and Honolulu, has real-time management of expenses vs. revenue, from both client contracts and grants across approximately 100 donors such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation. The time required to reconcile inventory has been reduced from up to four days to an hour. NTC is taking advantage of the SuiteVolunteers program to build a CFO dashboard and aid in contact management and forecasting, while extending its environment with solutions from NetSuite partners Avalara for sales tax compliance, Concur for expense reporting, Adaptive Planning for forecasting and Merchant e-Solutions for a payment gateway. “NetSuite has definitely assisted us in our mission,” said Phil Lee, NTC Controller. “NetSuite is a very solid, flexible system that enables us to keep an eye on cash on a daily basis so we know what we have funds for. We're very comfortable that we have a platform for growth with NetSuite.”
The San Francisco SPCA (www.sfspca.org), one of the most progressive animal protection nonprofits in the U.S., is channelling the savings in time and money realised with its NetSuite implementation into its mission of animal advocacy and adoption, with more than 4,500 animals adopted out each year. Replacing a Blackbaud Financial Edge application in mid-2010, NetSuite has enabled the SFSPCA to reduce IT requirements by up to 30 hours a month while avoiding a 0.5 full-time employee in finance and halving its monthly financial close time to five days. With large productivity gains across 220 users in 20 departments and eliminating its reliance on IT for business processes, the SFSPCA is more efficient in managing more than 5,000 inventory items, helping ensure appropriate stock for the care of animals. Selected over Intacct and Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains). NetSuite has given SFSPCA tighter financial controls and the ability to track budgets vs. actuals in real-time, supporting sound auditing and compliance with IRS regulations governing nonprofits, as well as fuelling good rankings on such websites as Charity Navigator. "NetSuite helps us save in both people's time and overall cost, and we can use those savings to save the lives of more adoptable animals," said Becky Correa, Controller and Director of Finance at the San Francisco SPCA. “NetSuite is so user-friendly you don't even need training. It's given us new ability to track budgets and plan projects and is improving productivity across our entire Organisation.”
Organisations interested in receiving a donation through NetSuite.org can apply online at www.netsuite.org.
About NetSuite.org
NetSuite.org is the corporate citizenship arm of NetSuite, leveraging the company's assets—our people and our product—to amplify the social impact of nonprofits and social enterprises around the world. Through our unique initiatives, including software donations, pro bono SuiteVolunteer projects and social solutions we are supporting organisations worldwide better achieve their missions. For more information on NetSuite's corporate citizenship, please visit www.netsuite.org.
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