Philippines Nonprofits Fuel Their Mission With NetSuite

SAN MATEO, Calif. and MAKATI CITY, Philippines, Nov. 6, 2015 /3BL Media/ -- NetSuite Inc., the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced three new Philippine nonprofit customers that are managing mission critical operations like accounting, ERP, social impact reporting, grant management and nonprofit business processes unique to their organizations with NetSuite. Cartwheel Foundation, Virlanie Foundation and Microventures Foundation are streamlining business processes, improving reporting both internally and with donors and gaining better insight into their organizations to help focus on their core missions.

All three organizations received the NetSuite solution as a software grant from the NetSuite.org corporate citizenship program, which offers free and discounted subscriptions to qualified nonprofits and social enterprises. Since its founding in 2008, the NetSuite.org corporate citizenship program has empowered more than 500 nonprofits and social enterprises with tools to amplify their impact in making the world a better place. To learn more about NetSuite's corporate citizenship programs, please visit www.netsuite.org.

With the software offered through NetSuite.org's donation program, nonprofits and social enterprises achieve a wide variety of efficiency gains, including:

• Increased efficiency and productivity. NetSuite.org grantees (the nonprofits and social enterprises that are receiving a software donation) have dramatically reduced the time and expense required for routine management of their organizations, eliminating manual processes and freeing valuable resources to pursue programs that better benefit their mission.
• Optimizing project and grant initiatives. Real-time visibility into budgets vs. actuals enables NetSuite.org grantees to make data-driven decisions on the best projects to pursue, optimizing impact and avoiding the bad decision making that can result from outdated or contradictory information.
• Increasing fundraising effectiveness. With NetSuite, organizations achieve a 360-degree view of their constituents, increasing donations from individuals and institutions, improving accountability and building long-lasting relationships.
• Accelerating growth. Using NetSuite, grantees are scaling their operations to more regions and reaching more beneficiaries and geographies, capitalizing on real-time visibility, flexibility and cloud mobility.

Cartwheel Foundation, Virlanie Foundation and Microventures Foundation are among the growing number of Filipino nonprofits benefiting from donations of NetSuite software.

Cartwheel Foundation (www.cartwheelfoundation.org), based in Mandaluyong City, is a nonprofit organization focused on nurturing indigenous Filipino heritage through culturally relevant education. Founded in 1999, Cartwheel Foundation began by opening a pre-school for indigenous Talaandig children in Miarayon, Bukidnon in southern Philippines. The organization has since expanded its services to implementing programs for indigenous communities in various parts of the country, such as early childhood education for young learners; life skills and capability building for adult learners; and scholarship and leadership programs for youth who want to pursue a college degree. In total its projects have reached 11,000 indigenous people in 40 indigenous communities. As it scaled up its efforts, the organization had to deal with voluminous data and multiple transactions that were becoming increasingly challenging to manage using its old system. As such, the Cartwheel team realized the clear and present need for a more efficient, integrated system that would support the organization's growth. After an implementation in March by NetSuite Solution Provider IT Group, Cartwheel Foundation is now using NetSuite to run financials and donor management. NetSuite's unified system has given the nonprofit easy, intuitive access to its expansive data, bringing all projects and budgets into a single location, while providing greater visibility into performance and a foundation for future improvements. Already, Cartwheel Foundation has seen an estimated 50 percent reduction in administrative tasks as duplicate tasks and manual reporting have been significantly reduced, while staff are quickly building up expertise with NetSuite's intuitive, easy-to-use interface. "Because of the ease of access to the system, we can see the possibilities for future programs," said Pia Ortiz-Luis, Executive Director. "There's a sense of readiness among the staff that we can reach out to a wider audience and work with our partner indigenous communities. In a real sense NetSuite brings us closer to our goal of operational excellence."

Virlanie Foundation (www.virlanie.org), based in Manila, was founded in 1992 to care for children in need of special protection, including the poor, the abandoned, abused, exploited, neglected and orphaned. Virlanie Foundation operates eight residential homes, serving approximately 200 children each, with outreach, support and sustainability programs. It implemented NetSuite to replace a disparate system of QuickBooks for accounting and separate Excel or Access spreadsheets for each of its programs. The disparate systems left the foundation with inconsistent data and cumbersome manual processes that made timely reporting a challenge. In some cases it could take up to a week to generate a report on a single child. With the help of NetSuite Solution Provider PGE Solutions, Virlanie implemented NetSuite in 2014 to manage mission critical business processes, including financials and real-time reporting and has created a customization to track the children it serves and their sponsors. As a result, Virlanie can now provide real-time KPIs to its employees through personalized dashboards and provide detailed information to sponsors about the children they've made donations to support. NetSuite's anywhere, anytime access also means that social workers in the field for the outreach program can quickly and easily enter data into the system. In the second and third phase of the project Virlanie plans to migrate its accounting and finance to NetSuite and then integrate its fund raising initiatives. "NetSuite's unified system means we have a single source of information that provides us with real-time data on our finances and the children we serve," said Dominque Lemay, Founder of the Virlanie Foundation. "As a result our donors have more confidence in knowing where their money is going and we are able to serve more children, more quickly."

MicroVentures Foundation, Inc. (MVF) and MicroVentures Inc. (MVI) are the organizations behind Hapinoy (www.hapinoy.com). Hapinoy is a program that works with more than 4,000 micro-entrepreneurs in the Philippines. These micro-entrepreneurs usually run small neighborhood retail stores known as sari-sari stores. MVF leads the training, community and capacity building efforts of Hapinoy while MVI is focused on providing innovative mobile technology-based business opportunities for the micro-entrepreneurs. Together, Hapinoy aims to empower these micro-entrepreneurs to manage and grow their businesses sustainably.  There are currently 1 million such stores in the Philippines and Hapinoy's goal is to provide them with the resources necessary to build a sustainable business through business training and capacity-building initiatives. After struggling with visibility into budgets across its many projects, specifically identifying expenses and reporting, both internally and to donors, Hapinoy, with the help of PGE Solutions, implemented NetSuite to manage its financials, expense reporting and donor tracking. NetSuite's unified system and real-time data access also means that management can make better business decisions while providing donors with accurate, monthly reports tracking donations, costs and budget. Overall, the solution also enabled the organization to be more cost efficient especially as they were able to perform accounting activities in-house, reducing the need for outsourced services. Not limited to the accounting functions, Hapinoy will soon be able to use NetSuite for data gathering and storage. This will efficiently eliminate the need for additional data gathering software for their community management and market research activities. "With NetSuite we are able to provide on-demand insights for decision making," said Jalu Go, Director of Operations. "We can see if a project is working or not from a financial perspective and decide if we are going to move forward with the project. It's allowing us to serve our constituents much faster and more effectively." 

"These three organizations are doing important, meaningful work in the Philippines," said James Dantow, NetSuite Senior Vice President for Worldwide Support and General Manager for the Philippines. "We're very pleased to be able to support their efforts through the NetSuite.org program and look forward to their continued success and good works."

Today, more than 24,000 companies and subsidiaries depend on NetSuite to run complex, mission-critical business processes globally in the cloud. Since its inception in 1998, NetSuite has established itself as the leading provider of enterprise-ready cloud business management suites of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and ecommerce applications for businesses of all sizes. Many FORTUNE 100 companies rely on NetSuite to accelerate innovation and business transformation. NetSuite continues its success in delivering the best cloud business management suites to businesses around the world, enabling them to lower IT costs significantly while increasing productivity, as the global adoption of the cloud accelerates.

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