Founded 30 years ago, CHOICE Humanitarian runs entrepreneurship and anti-poverty programs in 8 countries. CHOICE has impacted over 2 million lives, with 120+ projects across Kenya, Bolivia, Nepal, and other countries. Bret Backmann is a member of CHOICE’s board of directors.
What are CHOICE Humanitarian’s goals? Where do you envision yourself in a few years?
Our key financial/system goals at CHOICE are primarily:
- Get all of our operating units in all countries (8) on the same system
- Improve our Project tracking capabilities
- Improve our Donor Management capabilities
- Provide the type of reporting that will enable us to go after large, multi-year grants from larger foundations and government organizations
I expect that we’ll be able to accomplish those things by the end of 2022.
What was your previous finance system, and how did it hinder those goals?
We used Quickbooks in the US and a variety of systems in other countries. With that setup, we lacked transparency and consolidation capabilities across the organization. We also had very limited multi-currency, project tracking, and donor management options.
What attracted you to Xledger? What ultimately led you to choose us?
There were a handful of criteria that we used to evaluate potential ERP’s, and which ultimately led us to choose Xledger:
- Native cloud-based system (to provide access from anywhere and freedom from dealing with hardware
- True multi-entity capabilities within a single instance of the software
- Real multi-currency capabilities
- Multi-language options (5 of our entities are Spanish-speaking)
- Robust Project tracking
- Integrated Donor Management
- Ability to consolidate across entities
How has Xledger empowered your goals?
We’re mostly implemented in the US, but still training our non-US entities. So far, the results have been good. We’ve eliminated duplicate entry of our donations (we used to enter them into Quickbooks and also into a separate CRM) and greatly improved our Project tracking.
What part of Xledger has been most valuable for you as a team?
I don’t know if I could identify one “most valuable” part. The software is solid, the support team has been very helpful. We’re learning more about how to take advantage of the capabilities in the system.
But we like where we see you’re headed and hope to partner with Xledger for years to come.
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