How Boys & Girls Clubs of America improved efficiency, gained visibility over spend, and regained lost time with Ramp

Each team at BGCA – from youth development programming to accounting – is united by a collective commitment to the organization’s mission: To enable all young people, especially those who need us most, to reach their full potential as productive, caring, responsible citizens. “Serving the Boys & Girls Clubs and being part of a mission that is positively impacting youth across the country is tremendously rewarding,” says BGCA VP Controller, Jason Penegar. “For someone like myself, who works within finance, the best day we can have is when we provide excellent service to our colleagues. Our mission in accounting is to provide continuous support to make things seamless and efficient for our staff, so they can focus on supporting those local clubs and the youth in our nation, as well as ensuring that  we’re holding ourselves to the highest accountability of being responsible stewards of our finances and other resources.”

Jason’s goal, then, is to focus the finance team’s time on value-additive activities, responsiveness, and strategic priorities, and to devise systems and processes that are intuitive and efficient for the entire organization.

Under its legacy system, BGCA didn’t have a single sign-on, which resulted in frequent system lockouts. New hires had trouble completing their initial expense reports unassisted, which created frustration and friction within the finance team and led to multiple password resets. These burdens yielded numerous challenges with late expense reports, which impacted the finance team’s month-end close process. “Previously with our TE expenses, it was a cumbersome, inefficient process,” says Jason.

Jason needed a more efficient system – not simply in service of offering a better experience to his colleagues so they could focus their efforts on assisting youth in need, but also because strong internal controls and oversight is mission-critical to BGCA.

“As a not-for-profit, we’re inherently constrained,” Jason explains. “There’s always a scarcity of resources on the financial front, which amplifies the need to ensure we have strong financial controls and oversight to maximize the benefit of those resources on our mission.”