Cribs for Kids Puts Financial Inefficiency to Rest
Cribs for Kids began as a grief support organization. But in 1998 the staff realized that many of the families they were serving in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, didn't have a safe place for their newborns to sleep. Now providing cribs is the group's core competency, along with public education, the training of medical staff, and printed materials on safe sleeping for newborns.
Cribs for Kids partners with over 300 organizations across the U.S., and it has successfully helped place more than 100,000 cribs across the nation. The organization sells printed educational materials to its hundreds of partners and garners financing from private grants, individual donors, and fundraisers. In addition, it has a need to track the crib inventory and the inventory of its paper brochures.
While it relied on paper files and on basic accounting software for years, director of business operations Paulette Luczak reports, "We needed something that would better manage inventory; we have lots of customers as well as grant needs. QuickBooks lets us manage everything efficiently." The time saving provided by the donated Intuit software, which the organization received through TechSoup, was key for Luczak. It gave easy access to any specific partner so that Cribs for Kids could look up what they'd ordered, how many, and how much money they'd spent so that they could report to their funders. After QuickBooks, a task that would normally have taken an hour now takes about three minutes.
Within Cribs for Kids, Luczak reports further efficiencies in the annual auditing process. They were able to give the board of directors detailed information on how much money is tied up in inventory, the bank account balance and changes in finances, year-over-year, or month-to-month. Budgeting in each area used to be hand-done, and they would just hope it was accurate. Now, thanks to Intuit and TechSoup, it's accurate to the penny.
