Trenton Health Team
New Jersey
$18,000
per year recaptured in staff time – a 3x return on investment
24 hours / month
less time on grant reporting for the Finance team
20+ project leads
have visibility into real-time grant spend to make informed decisions to best-serve their community
Customer
Zoe Brookes, Chief Operating Officer
Trenton Health Team
About
Trenton Health Team is a nonprofit working to improve health and well-being across greater Trenton, New Jersey. It deploys staff with lived experience in the community to work directly with residents, partners with and lends capacity to local health organizations, and pairs that community insight with rigorous data analysis to close gaps in care.
Trenton Health Team first adopted Instrumentl to find new grant funding and manage its grant pipeline pre-award. When Instrumentl released its native Sage Intacct integration, the team jumped at the opportunity to bring post-award management into the same platform.
With one live view of grant spend in instrumetnl, Trenton Health Team replaced Monday.com and chronically out-of-date spreadsheet. Project leads now confidently spend every grant dollar they have been awarded, and the finance team gets 24 hours back every month
Before Instrumentl, one simple question could eat their accountant’s afternoon: how much is left to spend on this grant?
Every month, their two-person finance team rebuilt a line-by-line snapshot of budget-versus-actuals by hand for 35+ active grants. The process took nearly a full working week, every single month.
"It's a very manual process. We have to dump reports [from Sage], we get them into Excel or Google Sheets. It is very time consuming." – Joe Richter, Director of Finance at Trenton Health Team.
Managing deadlines post-award was similarly spread across spreadsheets and systems. Every time a grant was awarded, Eric Morales, Director of Grants and Development, rebuilt the deliverables and reporting schedule by hand in Monday.com.
The people who felt the impact of the disconnected systems most were the project leads running the programs, who couldn’t see grant spending on their own and relied on outdated numbers to make program budget decisions.
More often than not, project leads held back, spending cautiously on funds they had already been awarded rather than risk overspending.
"People are naturally cautious because they don't want to get into trouble and they end up leaving money on the table. We want to spend every penny of the grants we've been awarded." Zoe Brookes, Chief Operating Officer, Trenton Health Team
With Instrumentl, Trenton Health Team traded in Monday.com and manually updated spreadsheets with a single, real-time view into the status of awarded grants.
By integrating their Instrumentl account with Sage Intacct, expenses coded to a grant in Sage flowed will automatically to the same grant in Instrumentl, for all teams to see.
"I was impressed [with the integration], and I'm not typically very impressed with anything." Joe Richter, Director of Finance, Trenton Health Team
And for the first time, project leads could open Instrumentl and see a grant’s real-time burn rate and upcoming deadlines directly, without waiting on a monthly report.
They were able to retire Monday.com, and Instrumentl’s Award Assistant reads each grant agreement and extracts deadlines and creates tasks, delivering those deadline reminders automatically to project leads.
The impact of one live view into grant awards at Trenton was immediately impactful:
"We have improved spend down, we have reduced end-of-grant panic, and we're making spending decisions that are more impactful for community" –Zoe Brookes, Chief Operating Officer, Trenton Health Team
With grant reporting down to one day per month, Trenton Health Team recaptured time savings worth $18,000 a year – a 3x return on investment – on top of retiring Monday.com and its license cost.
And with spenddown visible to the roughly 20 project leads who run the work, spending decisions now sit with the people closest to the community.
Knowing where each grant dollar stands means that funding can make its way into the community where its needed, not sitting in a desk drawer.
When a bag of groceries or a paid utility bill can provide the brain capacity that lets someone focus on their health, staff members need the ability to act fast.
"The people who need to make decisions about how and when money is spent didn’t have good information about how much money is left….it's disempowering for the people who are responsible for impact." –Zoe Brookes, Chief Operating Officer at Trenton Health Team
Historically, project leaders had to wait on finance for a spending update on client incentives. That number usually showed up about eight weeks late, so the workaround was keeping a stack of gift cards kept in a desk drawer.
With real-time visibility into what’s been spent across their grants, program staff can make quick decisions to get those funds into the community, not stuck in a desk drawer.
"Having $100 to spare to give somebody makes an enormous difference to outcomes," – Zoe Brookes Chief Operating Officer at Trenton Health Team
Prospecting the old way meant choosing between "too many" or "too few." Hundreds of opportunities to cull through; multiple sources to cross-check. Or a handful results that might work, and a lingering concern: "What am I missing?"
Describe your program in your own words. We sift through the most up-to-date database in grants and surface only the opportunities worth your time. You never miss a grant that fits, and never waste an afternoon grants that don't.
