Westside Community Services

Founded in 1967, Westside Community Services is one of the oldest community-based mental health agencies in the nation. Today the organization continues to serve San Francisco residents who live on the margins of society, including people of color, those who are low-income, uninsured, homeless, or suffer from severe and chronic mental illness or HIV/AIDS. Each year Westside serves more than 3,500 individuals through a variety of mental health, substance abuse, and case management programs.

The Challenge:

• Westside was using an outdated legacy software system that was not intuitive and difficult for staff to use.
• Creating useful reports was a manual process that took days. System-generated reports were in a format that was
  neither clear nor useful to managers
  or stakeholders.
• The lack of timely reporting caused managers to overspend their budgets or to hastily spend remaining funds at the end of a period.

The Solution:

• With a reporting module that offers up to 10 levels of reports and enables users to change a variety of settings from within reports, Blackbaud’s The Financial Edge was the clear choice as the most streamlined and powerful solution considered.
• The organization made an easy conversion from Fundware to The Financial Edge. Having a team of Blackbaud consultants who have a lot of experience with this type of conversion made it even easier.
• Westside directors and managers received view-only licenses so they can now directly assess their year-to-date operational spending and remaining budget allowances.
• For the first time, staff can now generate a variety of “self-serve” basic reports directly from the dashboard.

The Results:

• Easy, accurate reporting: Today, all necessary financial reports can be generated in minutes, and accurately.
• More staff time for working towardsthe mission: Agency staff members now use time previously spent creating reports to analyze report data and make improvements and recommendations.
• The fiscal manager is now able to spend more time reconciling contract payments and billing, which enables the agency to more effectively monitor progress toward contract goals.