Cooperative Extension Gains Deep Visibility into Grants, Programs, and Finances with Acumatica Cloud ERP

Video transcript: Cornell Cooperative Extension - Success Story of Acumatica Cloud ERP

There's a huge range of things that go on in Extension in New York State. We cover agriculture, community and economic development, the environment, nutrition, youth and families. The environment is one of our priority areas. There are seven million acres of farms in New York State. Cornell Cooperative Extension educators work with farms. What are the farming practices that are the most protective of the watershed? Making sure that we're keeping water clean and we're keeping farm products away from drinking water. There's fifty six different associations in the state of New York. So each one of them does things just a little bit differently since they're their own actual 501c3 entities. When we were working with Sage, there were obviously some roadblocks to success. Most frequently, things like our staff not being able to get information they needed in a timely manner. It was on servers located on campus. Those servers were getting old and also software needed to be upgraded. Until their books were closed for the previous year, they were spending blind. There was no way to look at current activity. With the help of our Prelude partner, we were able to roll out three to four counties a week and switch them from our previous Sage software to Acumatica. We road mapped out the project realistically and expectations were met on both sides. It was a true team effort. We were able to have a one to one and a half hour live meeting, walked them through the processes of accounts payable, accounts receivable, banking, general ledger. And after that, they were really good to go. In February of twenty twenty, we started realizing that all of our staff were going to need to go remote and in particular our finance staff would still need to be able to connect to accounts to pay bills. I was used to having to go to the office and look up something in a file cabinet. Everything I need is in Acumatica. Right before we started talking, I stood over to the left, pulled my cell phone out, and I looked at a receipt from a four H'er about a scholarship and approved the voucher for it. Every few years we have to do an economic impact study. In the past it's taken literally months to put that data together. We expect to be able to do that in just a few days now. In addition, looking at Vallexo, that's been a great tool for us to make sure that we can get all the reporting that we need. Accumedica has given everyone on my staff increased independence to get the information they need. It's a complete business solution as opposed to just financial software package. Product fits us very well where we are right now and it also offers the opportunity to grow with us. Acumatica is magic.