Workflows Used
Organization & Mission
Founded in 1833, Haverford College is one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges with a history rich in Quaker tradition. Known for its academic rigor and honor code, today the college is an active advocate for racial and gender equality. The College’s curriculum includes a wide range of academic programs; students are true collaborators and trusted colleagues in the classroom, working directly with the material and ideas of their discipline.
Challenges
Haverford College relies on charitable giving to support academic enrichment, financial aid, the student experience, athletics, and other important initiatives. However, the college’s existing gift posting process required significant manual effort, creating inefficiencies across multiple departments and making it difficult to keep financial information current.
Complicated and Time-Consuming Gift Posting Process
Historically, Haverford College used the native posting functionality in Raiser’s Edge to integrate gift information into its finance system. The process required the Gifts and Records team to review and manually update the post file created by Raiser’s Edge before sending it to the IT department. IT staff then had to perform additional manual manipulations to transform the file into a format the finance system could accept, making the entire workflow lengthy and cumbersome.
Limited Validation and Frequent Reconciliation Efforts
The posting process provided little validation along the way and often failed to deliver all of the information the business office needed. If discrepancies were identified, files were sent back to the Gifts and Records team for correction, requiring the entire process to be repeated. As a result, both the gifts and records team and the business office spent considerable time reconciling gift data and manually researching missing information.
Operational Bottlenecks and Dependence on Key Staff
Because the process was so complicated, the college could only post gifts once or twice per week instead of daily. The team was also lean, meaning that if a key employee was out sick or on vacation, the process would stall until they returned. Staff across multiple departments were spending valuable hours on manual procedures that prevented them from focusing on more strategic work.
Solution
As Haverford College prepared to transition to a new finance system, the institution partnered with Omatic to streamline its gift posting process and eliminate the inefficiencies that had long burdened staff across departments.
Implemented PostOmatic for Automated Gift Posting
After successfully using other Omatic products, including ImportOmatic and ScoreOmatic, Haverford explored whether Omatic could provide a solution for its posting challenges. The college discovered that PostOmatic could be configured to automate the movement of gift data from Raiser’s Edge into the new finance system, eliminating many of the manual steps previously required.
Customized Posting Files to Meet Finance System Requirements
PostOmatic was configured to filter and group gifts exactly as Haverford needed while delivering output in the precise format and with the exact fields required by the new finance system. This customization ensured that the business office received all necessary information while eliminating the need for IT staff to manipulate files before importing them into the finance system.
Created a More Flexible and Reliable Process
By working closely with Omatic, Haverford developed a solution that reduced dependence on individual team members and made the posting process easier to manage. The system’s flexibility allowed staff to handle updates and changes internally while ensuring reports could still be processed efficiently even when team members were unavailable.
Results
With PostOmatic in place, Haverford College transformed its gift posting process, dramatically reducing manual effort while improving efficiency, accuracy, and access to critical financial information.
Reduced Posting Time from Hours to Minutes
The posting process that once required multiple manual steps across several departments now takes only a couple of minutes from start to finish. The Gifts and Records team no longer performs additional procedures to prepare files, and the IT department no longer needs to manipulate data before it can be imported into the finance system.
Enabled Daily Posting and More Current Financial Data
Because the process is now fast and efficient, Haverford can post gift information every day rather than only once or twice per week. This improvement helps ensure that gift data remains current within the finance system and provides staff with more timely and accurate information for financial reporting and decision-making.
Improved Accuracy and Reduced Work Across Departments
The business office now receives all the information it needs without spending time researching missing details or reconciling gift data. PostOmatic’s ability to separate posting files by gift sub-type helps ensure gifts are recorded accurately in the appropriate bank accounts, while the elimination of manual processes has freed staff across Gifts and Records, IT, and the business office to focus on higher-value work.
PostOmatic was super simple to set up and is easy to use. Omatic was able to customize the software to include everything our business office needed
John Burk
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