Community Youth Ministries (CYM) is a non-profit organization that caters to the needs of at-risk youth through various initiatives. Every year, over 4,000 youth see their lives transformed through after-school programs, comprehensive sexual health education, support for teen moms, substance abuse counseling, restorative justice, and beyond.
Upon receiving a large amount of funding that grew their monthly budgets tenfold, Chief Operating Officer Adrian Alvarado set out to find a spend management solution that could help CYM optimize budget allocation at scale. Critically, they needed an easy-to-use and seamless purchasing process for their many program directors and school sites.
The challenges
Before adopting procure-to-pay software, CYM followed a manual process involving multiple steps and systems. This process required significant manual data entry work for everyone from site leads to their accounting department, resulting in inefficiencies and headaches.
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Manual, error-prone process: Prior to Procurify, requests and purchases were tracked via email and spreadsheets, leading to redundant data entry and slow processing times; a single purchase request typically took about a month of work.
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Lack of budget visibility: Opaque budgets in spreadsheets were slowing processes and making it difficult to optimize supply budget allocation across CYM’s many schools and sites.
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Cumbersome three-way matching: Without centralized context and documentation around purchase decisions, three-way matching was tedious and inefficient — especially for a high volume of Amazon purchases — making it difficult to adhere to audit guidelines.
The solution
When a previous provider failed to meet Community Youth Ministries’ expectations, Alvarado turned to Procurify to help streamline and automate the nonprofit’s procurement processes.
After a seamless and speedy implementation process with Procurify (just two weeks!), CYM quickly saw an improvement in their overall purchasing efficiency and budget visibility.
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Real-time spend visibility: Site leads can now monitor budgets in real time and feel confident making budget-informed purchases. Additionally, principals have complete oversight of the total cost of the supplies, vendor services, and field trips for their students.
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Actionable spend insights: Procurify provides CYM with all the necessary tools to effectively manage its financial operations. Comprehensive reports and dashboards help track spending and budget adherence throughout the year, and vendor and budget insights help them make strategic, data-backed decisions.
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Easy onboarding and adoption: Site leads have been pleased with the user-friendly nature of Procurify, finding it easy to navigate and integrate into their workflows. On-call customer support and comprehensive resources empower team members to quickly find answers to their burning questions.
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Automation features: Automated three-way matching has helped CYM eliminate manual processes, reducing the time and effort required to reconcile purchases. Additionally, Procurify’s Amazon PunchOut has shaved hours of manual reconciliation work off their Amazon purchasing workflows.
Takeaways
Procurify continues to empower Community Youth Ministries to improve the efficiency of their purchasing workflows, saving time and enabling greater productivity. With real-time visibility into their budgets, they can rest assured that their funding will have the greatest potential impact.
What’s more, spending less time on their spend management practices means that CYM has more time to focus on the success of their inspiring mission: providing support and opportunities to youth from their communities.
“We used to have a full-time purchasing manager but decided not to backfill the position. With Procurify, we can achieve more with our existing staff, maximizing productivity without increasing our workforce.”
Adrian Alvarado
Chief Operating Officer
