Gateway Church automates reporting and dashboards with Sage Intacct

Client background

Comprised of eleven locations, Gateway is a multicampus, evangelistic, Spirit-empowered church in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex and Jackson Hole, WY, experiencing tremendous growth.

The business challenge

With the addition of new campuses across the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex and Jackson Hole, WY, Gateway Church was experiencing drastic growth and its server-based accounting platform couldn’t keep up, revealing unforeseen challenges.

Gateway Church’s legacy accounting platform required its staff members to do a great deal of manual work with the finance team having to calculate average giving by location, and weekly and monthly reports manually in Excel. Additionally, staff members would spend large amounts of time cutting and pasting data into reports and reviewing data for accuracy, resulting in inaccurate data. The amount of manual work became exasperated with the addition of new campuses, making data entry and generating reports even more time-consuming and less reliable.

In addition to relying on Excel, Gateway Church experienced challenges managing disparate systems across multiple sites. As the church continued to grow, managing the data flow from accounts payable and other processes became taxing.

Strategy and solution

Gateway Church recognized they needed to find a new financial system. The Lead Director of Administration kept hearing of Sage Intacct. The church chose Baker Tilly to purchase and implement Sage Intacct’s cloud-based accounting platform with easy access anytime anywhere. Baker Tilly had a reputation for deep church knowledge and years of experience with Sage Intacct.

After the implementation of Sage Intacct, Baker Tilly was able to teach Gateway Church how to automate its monthly reports and dashboards. With that automation, Gateway Church’s financial reporting staff gained 25% more time to prepare reports. With Sage Intacct’s cloud-based platform, Gateway Church has been able to ditch its paper-based processes and can now access financial data, from anywhere with a secure internet browser.

By leveraging the flexibility of the cloud, Gateway Church can efficiently share data between its various technology platforms, improving collaboration and productivity. As a result, the church has reduced the amount of time that staff members spend integrating software to produce informative and accurate reports. Finance staff members can find answers in minutes that previously took hours even days to research.

In the last eight years, Gateway Church has grown to eleven locations and has been able to add new campuses easily using the support of Baker Tilly and the dynamics of Sage Intacct. With trustworthy, real-time data, the church's staff has been enabled to shift more of their focus toward supporting their mission and community.