pointA Gets Peace of Mind Outsourcing Bookkeeping to Enkel
pointA vision is to see sustainable transportation options for everyone. Established in 2001, pointA was the first Transportation Management Association (TMA) in Ontario with the goal of reducing the number of people driving alone to work in the North Toronto and Vaughan areas. Four years later, the program expanded and formed the Smart Commute Association, which brought together several TMAs to deliver the Smart Commute Program, which encourages sustainable transportation in the workplace. Today, the program is jointly funded and delivered by the regions and municipalities in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Region.
In the 18 years since it started, the Smart Commute Program has enabled 2.4 million fewer car trips per year, 2.9 million more walking and cycling trips per year, 1 million fewer tons of carbon emissions, and $5.27 million dollars in fuel savings per year. Today, the Smart Commute program is delivered to over 340 workplaces across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area. pointA now offers a wide range of services that help organizations address sustainable transportation including Smart Commute, Shuttles, Best Workplace for Commuters, Remote Work Support, and Sustainability Reporting.
Dorinda So, Executive Director at pointA describes herself as a “very good millennial”, having worked at a number of different jobs in different industries before settling into the nonprofit sector in 2012. With a rich background in public policy and economic research, she landed at pointA in June of 2019 – 7 months before COVID-19 upended society as we knew it.
The Challenge
Just before the pandemic hit, Dorinda and her team realized that while their office was great, it wasn’t fully “working” for them. Their own employees were spending a lot of time commuting, and being an organization advocating for more sustainable commuting solutions, Dorinda realized that they needed to better support and invest more in their employees.
To that end, they developed a remote work strategy for the organization. Little did they know that this program would become mission critical as the global pandemic started marching across Canada and the rest of the world in March of 2020. According to Dorinda, “Executing our remote work strategy was straightforward in every area except finance and accounting”.
At the time, pointA’s financial management processes were heavily paper-based with printing, scanning, and filing at the core. They needed to shift everything to a digital cloud environment. It all hit home when during the pandemic, they had to access important files on an old computer, in an office they couldn’t get into. It was time to make the change.
A downside to having a fairly small team is that when one person gets sick or has other situations that prohibit them performing their role, progress, projects, and other deliverables can come to a complete stop. This was particularly true with bookkeeping and accounting activities that often required time-sensitive actions. And with Covid running rampant through society, this problem was happening more and more often.
The Solution
Not knowing what accounting options were out there, Dorinda turned to Google. A quick search for bookkeeping services landed her on the Enkel website. Enkel provides a number of back office services including the bookkeeping and accounts payable solutions pointA was specifically looking for. Because there are so many differences between for-profit and nonprofit accounting, Dorinda was particularly interested in Enkel because of their dedicated nonprofit division.
According to Dorinda, “The great thing about Enkel is that not only did they bring the nonprofit accounting expertise we were looking for, but the service came with all of the Cloud technology, tools and integrations we needed to make everything run smoothly.” Being in Toronto, the only way pointA could work seamlessly with the Enkel team was by having a robust set of software tools to work with.
While every Enkel client has a single point of contact, there is a team of experts behind them. pointA required both Bookkeeping and Accounts Payable services at the onset, and eventually added Controllership Services to their engagement. There is no longer a single point of failure, as the layers of expertise at Enkel are always able to step up when someone is sick or otherwise unavailable
Results
pointA has seen a number of changes and improvements as a result of moving their back office functions to Enkel. Below are just a few things they’ve experienced:
- Saving 64% of the time previous spent managing accounting functions
- Have eliminated the majority of their need for printing, scanning and document storage
- Have increased transparency across all key stakeholders
- Require far less office space than before
- Have a MUCH smoother audit process every year
- More secure file storage solutions
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