The Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Tarrant County serves about 23,000 youth in the Fort Worth and Arlington areas of Texas with a range of programs geared to help youngsters mature into healthy, productive, caring, and responsible adults. The nonprofit provides after-school and summer programs, and initiatives focused on education, character and leadership, drug prevention, and gang intervention across 27 locations. With a $23 million annual budget, financial management is
essential to the organization’s success.

Improving finance and accounting became a top priority when Robert Ehret, with a background in church and bank finance, joined the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Fort Worth as its CFO in 2014. (The club would merge with a sister club in Arlington to create the Tarrant County organization in 2018, with 290 full- and part-time employees). Ehret quickly found that the club’s previous accounting application, and heavy reliance on Excel, wasn’t well suited to the needs of a nonprofit organization.

“It was just so difficult to extract information,” Ehret said. “You couldn’t report across fiscal years, and the majority of our grants cross fiscal years. It was a very lengthy process just to produce board reports, and if you needed to make a change it was very painful to go through the whole process of making an adjusting entry and rerunning reports. There was no doubt we needed to make a change.”….