Case Study: Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)
Back in February at Sage Transform 2024, Tom Roberts – Systems Business Analyst at Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) came by our booth to introduce himself and praise Velixo. We recently caught up with him to discuss how Velixo changed the game for MADD, an amazing Not-For-Profit business that Velixo is very humble to have as a customer.
Customer summary
- Company: Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) https://madd.org
- Headquarter: Irving, Texas, USA
- Operations: USA, Canada, Brazil
- Industry: Not-For-Profit, Community Awareness
- ERP System: Sage Intacct
- 1 Year with Velixo
- 2 Report designers, 50+ users
About MADD
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is a non-profit organization in the USA, Canada and Brazil dedicated to preventing drunk driving and supporting victims of this preventable crime. Founded in 1980 by Candace Lightner after her daughter was killed by a drunk driver, MADD has been instrumental in raising awareness about the dangers of impaired driving and advocating for stricter laws and penalties. Through education, victim support services, and advocacy efforts, MADD strives to eliminate drunk driving and save lives on the roads.
In the USA, MADD serves a role in each state, working tirelessly to achieve the goal of No More Victims. The MADD’s Finance team, CFO – Amber Kinney, Controller – Jackie Mottola, Assistant Controller – Ben Davis, and the amazing staff of accountants are centrally located in Irving, Texas at MADD’s headquarters. The accountants work with Regional and State directors to aid in invoicing, allocation of funds, and expense reporting.
Key Challenges
MADD adopted Sage Intacct in 2017. They utilized the native reporting features as well as other platforms alongside Sage Intacct for budgeting and reporting, but:
- The native reporting resulted in significant challenges due to ERP limitations and the manual methods required to pull reports from Sage Intacct.
- The other platforms were time-consuming, highly technical, and required extensive development time.
- Regular updates to the Board became frustrating due to complex relationships between multiple systems.
- Data synchronization was not timely.
Velixo as a Game Changer
Self-service without limits
Simple to Use
“If you’ve ever used the SUM function in Excel, you can pull data out of Intacct. It’s that easy!”
Up and Running Quickly
Simply plug-and-play Velixo functions into existing spreadsheets to turn them into live, dynamic reports.
Self-service
Velixo allows the MADD team of two analysts to build internal templates they share with end-users who can customize them to their needs.
Significant Efficiency Boost
"30 person-hours is saved every month, by being able to quickly access information"
Multi-Dimension Reports
Velixo allows MADD to create reports with as many dimensions as they need, the way they want it.
Live data without API costs
Since API costs are included in Velixo's subscription - this is not extra - MADD is in control of their API costs.
Tom gave us an example for why multi-dimensionality is critical to MADD:
“MADD hosts multiple events, ‘Walk Like MADD’ as fundraisers. Each of these events are a unique Project within Sage Intacct and have at minimum four dimensions, Class (an expense Grant funded or not), Department (where funds would be credited), Location (Functional Expense) and Employee.
Velixo enables us to show Employee cost over Functional Expense for any number of locations and if those costs are grant covered or not.”
"Prior to Velixo this would mean running multiple reports for each dimension then manually trying to get them aligned."
Favorite features
Tom praised Velixo for the following features. In his own words:
- SI.OBJECTDEFINITION and SI.QUERY – “A set of functions that lets you effectively perform SQL like searching on Intacct Data Objects, or put another way look at a type of object such as Project or Purpose and return the fields of info you want based on easy-to-use criteria. This lets us quickly answer things like: How many Projects are currently active in Texas, or How many Walks were held in the Northwest Region last year, and How many are planned for this year?”
- The ability to use Sage Intacct’s Account Groups within Velixo Functions – “We can quickly create reports with a few words like: Contributions, Grants, Other Revenue or Expenses; and have it pull the correct general ledger accounts either to return either a total amount or with a function SI.EXPANDACCOUNTSINGROUP as each account itself. This also means we can set up reports to use dynamic arrays rather than fields with long lists of account numbers that periodically change”.
- Copy Workbook without Formulas – “This is a remarkably useful function to be able to share documents and views of data by making it static and able to be shared without requiring Velixo or Intacct access to see the data”.
He also made a comment about the Velixo Help center:
What’s next for MADD
MADD is planning to enable access to non-Finance members to empower their Regional and State Directors with more reports, enabling data driven actions with the ability to see areas of under and over-spend and identifying ways to compare Program effectiveness of funds spent.
They’re also into building better dashboards, and automating alerts by notifying the business based on different metrics such as: Vendor aging exceeding Payment terms.
At the time of writing, Velixo only just released its universal Writeback function that is able to push data to any object of Sage Intacct. Tom expressed a strong interest in this feature for creating new Vendors and Purchase Orders in bulk, among many other use cases.
It may very well be that we write about their experience with universal Writeback in a Part II!