Bri-anna Ramsden   0:05
Hello everyone and welcome. We're glad that you could join us today in our latest webinar, Dimensions in Practice, A Conversation for Finance Leaders. And as we let people sneak in and join us, I'm just going to go over some quick housekeeping.
Cameras and mics are on today, so feel free to pop them on. Keep in mind, try to mute yourself when you're not talking to cut down on the background noise. I'm sure you all want to hear my dogs arguing over toys throughout this webinar. A copy of today's recording will be sent out within five business days.
And to make the most out of this session, we'd love for you to engage, respond to our polls, answer questions in the chat, and of course, ask your own questions. That's how you're going to get the most.
Now, quick agenda. This one might waiver a little bit depending on how the conversations go, but we're going to start with some introductions, chat about why dimensions matter and what they are, talk about common issues, real life examples, apply the concepts, and then open up to questions.
Joining us today, we have three former executives from nonprofits, so I'm going to let them each do a quick two-sentence introduction of themselves. I'm going to start with Jennifer.

Jennifer Hume   1:23
Thanks, Bri. So my name is Jennifer Hume and I'm one of the pre-sales consultants here at Spark Rock. I have been with Spark Rock for four years. I am a designated accountant and before joining Spark Rock, I was a customer for 12 years, three years as a Director of Finance at a school division and nine years as a CFO at.
At a Human Services nonprofit organization, I will hand it over to Kinley.

Kinley Graham   1:49
Hi, my name is Kinley Graham. I'm the Director of Presales here at Spark Rock. I've been at Spark Rock for about 10 years now. I was a customer for five years before that where I was a Chief Information Officer. Coming to Spark Rock, I've been a consultant, held many different roles in professional services, sales.
Working with product and yeah, that's me. I'll hand it over to Meg now.

Meg Wilson   2:15
Thanks Kinley. My name's Meg Wilson. I'm a Sales Director at Sparkrock and like my team members, I came from the nonprofit world. I was a Director of Finance. I've lived the world of chart of accounts and reporting and I've actually implemented ERP and I liked it so much I decided to come work in this.
This industry to help other nonprofits and I am, although Bree said two sentences, I'm going to speak a little longer and I'm going to give you a quick overview of who Sparkrock is, just for context before we go into the dimensions part of this session.
So Bree, so Sparkproc is purpose built and purpose backed and we come from the same mission driven world you work in every day. You can tell from both Kinley and Jennifer and also my background.
You know, we are a team of of non-profit experienced consultants and and developers and we were founded to serve non-profits. We've spent over 20 years in fact serving non-profits. So we have a lot of really great experience that we're going to bring today in this dimensions overview.
You also wanted you to know that we are a Microsoft based solution, so the solution is secured by Microsoft stability, trust, security. We have clients in both the US and Canada which allows also supported regional.
Data. So if you're a Canadian customer, your data is in Canada. If you're AUS customer, your data is in the US. So super pleased to do this overview and Bree, I think we have one more slide and then we'll hand it over.
Oh yeah, a little bit about our our metrics. So we are, as I mentioned, nonprofit first platform built and backed by Microsoft. We actually manage over 3.2 billion in nonprofit finances annually, 1.5 billion in payroll and as I mentioned previously.
20 plus years experience. So our commitment's simple. Your mission, your data, we're here to protect and support you. Reid.

Bri-anna Ramsden   4:35
All right, now, if you joined us, you might be looking for a certificate at the end of this. So to achieve that, here's our learning objectives. Today, you're going to learn about the strategic role dimensions in improving reporting and budgeting, how to identify common issues, how to outline.
And improve the governments and control. Evaluate your organization's current dimension structure. Apply some real life concepts like approvals, budgeting, and reporting for finance scenarios, and outline some practical next steps to help optimize your dimension strategy.
But before I let Meg and Jen take it away, I want to ask you a quick question. What is the biggest challenge that you have with reporting today? Dimensions can tie directly to reporting, so I want to hear.
But you think does messy data, inconsistent use, overwhelming reports, confusion, or all of the above affect you?
All of the above so far seems to be very popular. Oh, live in action. We're changing it up.
A lot of all of the above. That's amazing.

Meg Wilson   5:59
and not surprising. We see that a lot.

Bri-anna Ramsden   6:01
Not surprising at all.
OK, well, I have one more as we get a little more specific.
How many GL accounts do you have today? Zero to 200, 200 to 500, 500 to 1000 or over 1000?
This is all anonymous, so you don't need to worry about that. We're just really curious to hear what you have to say.
Some with very little, some with a lot.
Really interesting.

Meg Wilson   6:48
Also not surprising, I came from a world where I had 10,000 GL accounts before I moved to Dimensional, so.

Jennifer Hume   6:49
Not surprising.

Bri-anna Ramsden   6:56
Thank you for answering, and now I'm going to let Jen steal it from me.

Jennifer Hume   7:05
All right. Thank you, Bree. I'm going to share my screen.
I can make sure.
You can see it. If I can just get a thumbs up from one of the people on camera, I can see Kinley going. Yes. So great. Thank you very much. So great. OK. So I am going to talk about why dimensions matter. Hopefully this will be.

Bri-anna Ramsden   7:21
We got it.

Jennifer Hume   7:30
The only part of this webinar that will be someone just talking at you. We really want to, once we kind of get the fundamentals out of the way, to really have a conversation with some of the people in the webinar, if you'd like to share and talk about what you're looking for. So I'm going to talk about the mechanics, then I will invite my.
My colleagues and we'll share a little bit of our real world experience when it comes to dimensions and I will add a few of my own. OK, so first, why dimensions? Well, I'm going to start with talking first of all about.
The difference between a segmented and a logical chart of accounts. So with a segmented GL account, this is where you start with like your natural GL account. So like on the screen here and then you add segments. Oh I someone is not muted.
We could get get them. Can we mute them, Bree?

Bri-anna Ramsden   8:29
I've got it. Keep going.

Jennifer Hume   8:30
OK. All right. Thank you. All right. So natural GL account and then you have segments that represent different areas of your business. So jail account, dash department, dash location, dash program, things like that. So this chart type of chart of accounts is really, really great for control.
Because they're set up so that you control exactly how things go together and and and everything is in your your chart of accounts. Because if the segment doesn't exist then you can't post to it. But the downside is which what we saw in in the the survey is that you get.
A massive charts of accounts because every possible combination needs to exist and this obviously makes reporting really cumbersome. So when I say massive, I'm talking a very cluttered like 75,000 plus GL accounts we've seen so with.
The dimensional or the logical chart of accounts. So this is where you start again with your your your GL account, your natural GL account, and then you have dimensions that are completely separate. They're they're outside of your chart of accounts.
And so now you might ask, well, why is this better? Well, it's better because first of all, instead of having 75,000 GL accounts, you have 130 and we take those segments and we create dimensions. So dimensions are values that categorize entries in the system and by.
And by doing this, you can track and analyze all the transactions you make into the system that have dimensions attached to them, and you can have multiple dimensions attached to a transaction. There are unlimited numbers of dimensions that can be created.
So using a logical chart of accounts with dimensions is really great from reporting because you can slice and dice and and you know, create filters for just the dimensions that you need to do the reporting for. So let's now see how this logical chart of accounts with dimensions can meet.
Your needs. So a typical GL account structure for like a nonprofit that uses fund accounting might look something like this. So you have the fund, then you might have the department. So you know the funds might be like an operating account or a.
Like a general fund, a restricted or unrestricted fund departments, you know your IT or or any of your programs. And then finally you have a your GL account. This is the natural GL account that determines where it shows up in your trial balance. So those are the basics.
But in your organization, this you may need more. So you may also need to track, let's say a grant or maybe you've got, you know, revenue coming in. So you want to track this grant. There might be expenses also that you want to.
Attach to this grant as well, but maybe instead of a grant you want to have a location to track. So maybe you've got, you know, 24/7 facilities and again you need to track revenue and expenses to each one of those locations.
But you might actually need to track both, so you might want to track grant and location. So now we're getting into a more sophisticated GL with more dimensions and more things to track.
So these are the examples of the of what I'm going to walk through to get an understanding of dimensions and how this structure supports each organization's needs. So in Sparkrock, there are many dimensions, as many dimensions as you need.
You can see that there's four of them up here, so fund, department, grant and location, and these are the dimensions that I'm going to work with today. So in Sparkrock, each of these dimensions can support values so they can match maybe a numbering system or a numbering scheme.
That you already have that works for you. They can be numeric if you want. They can you know 10 or twenty-five, twenty-five for the grant, but the system also supports alpha characters. So instead of you know 10 for the fund, maybe it's general and maybe the location is S instead of 500.
You could also have hierarchies within that dimension structure. So maybe the South you actually have more defined locations like then maybe the name of the street if it's a 24/7 facility or whatever location that you want to call it.
So in your dimensions you can have S, you can have NWE and then underneath that you can also have this hierarchy of additional locations. So this is really really useful for reporting because if you want to report maybe just on your S locations then you would just report on South total.
But if you want to do on Saint John's, then you would then report on the Saint John's dimension. So it's the same thing with any of the other dimensions and also with even with your your GL account, your natural account. So maybe this is an expense, this is maybe your salaries.
So you know, 50100 is, you know, salaries, the next one is maybe time sheets and then you can have all your benefits. So you can then actually just report based on your total salaries, which would be, you know, a roll up of of all of those accounts.
So again, this supports the structure that you need. It also supports as many dimensions or segments as you need as well.
And it supports the unlimited hierarchy and coding that you need when whether it's alpha, numeric or a combination thereof.
It also supports the reporting and I've talked a little bit about reporting, you know, as we're talking, but let me show you an example of how that can actually happen. So here's this slide and at the top here you have general. So that's your fund, right? So this could be general, this could be.
Restricted, unrestricted. It could be in the capital fund, but we'll stick with general.
And then underneath here you have another dimension. So these are your departments, right? So admin, finance, programs, IT. And then on this side you have your GL accounts, supplies, salaries and travel. So when you put these together and you start to look at some reporting.
And we're you can see now the intersectionality between departments at the top and the GL accounts down the side. So you can see here when you're using dimensions, if you want to report just on admins, excuse me, travel, you'd use these two dimensions and you'd get your 250 or maybe.
Maybe it's IT supplies again those two dimensions and then you would get that value for the dimension.
So you can see how easy it is for reporting. Now the last thing I want to show you on this screen is how then you can still have the totals, right? So if you want the department totals, so this could actually be like, you know, a mini PNL statement for your admin department because you could have all of your, you know, revenue.
But then also your expenses down here and then you can have your department total. So all of finances, expenses, all of ITS and similarly on the GL side, if you want to know just what it is, what your organization is spending on supplies, again that's really easy to to report.
So if we go back to here, you see the the the the structure that you need, as many dimensions as you need, the unlimited hierarchy and also support the flow of reporting that you need, which in the end gives your data meaning.
I am now going to hand this over back to hand this over back to Bree for another poll.

Bri-anna Ramsden   17:02
All right, I'm gonna steal control again, Jen. Don't mind me. Oh, never mind. It booted me up. Good old tech.
Work for a tech company. Can't get tech to work. That's how it works with PowerPoint. So we are going to do we'll get it back up in a second. We are going to do a quick poll to see if you use dimensions right now.

Jennifer Hume   17:15
Well, I just stopped sharing.

Bri-anna Ramsden   17:25
Well, I get the PowerPoint to listen to me.
Not too bad. Yes and no. We have a mix.

Meg Wilson   17:54
I'll just wait for that deck to come back.

Bri-anna Ramsden   17:56
There we go.

Meg Wilson   18:00
And do you want to? Yeah. And then I'll take take control.

Bri-anna Ramsden   18:00
We just we gotta move forward a few.
There we go. We have one more though.

Meg Wilson   18:07
OK, right.

Bri-anna Ramsden   18:10
I have one more to launch here. How many dimensions do you think you would need to effectively manage your organization's compliance and reporting requirements? So you're 3, four to six or seven plus?

Meg Wilson   18:28
That could be tricky since a lot of people don't have dimensions today, but give it a give it a go.

Bri-anna Ramsden   18:36
Something to think about.

Meg Wilson   18:38
Yeah.

Bri-anna Ramsden   18:42
A lot, say four to six.
Interesting. All right, Meg, take it away. How about you chat about why four to six might be a good idea?

Kinley Graham   18:48
That's fair.

Meg Wilson   18:53
Yeah, well, let me take control here. And whoops, it just crashed on me. Did it? Hold on. What's happening? There we go.
All right. So Jen, thanks. That was a really good overview. And I'm sure that makes sense to most of the people on this, on this webinar, because people are often used to working with pivot tables. And so you can kind of think of it like a pivot table. But but really, what does it mean? What do good dimensions unlock?
****.
Well, I mean, this is the heart of the story. It's not just an extra field. They're actually key to clarity. And that's when Jim was saying they bring meaning to the data. So like, I like to think of it like a vision correction, you know, without dimensions, everything is sort of blurry and reactive, but with them.
Can actually see the important things that are happening, the things that are meaningful to you that are happening. So for decisions, it really helps with budget and budget clarity and I'll talk a little bit about that with workflow, but when you've got a dimensional system.
The.
And you're tracking and you're doing approvals using dimensions. You're gonna have a lot of control over your spend management because you can get quite granular on how things are approved or depending on your organization structure, you can roll it up to just approve at a really high level budget. So it allows you that.
Flexibility. You're gonna be able to get down to the true roots of your variances. So this is like back to that kind of slice, dice, pivot. You can actually really quickly go through the data to see what is the root of variances when you do have them, and then it empowers your program manager.
if you have them or you know anyone that's managing a fund or generally for the people we work with, it's program managers and and you're giving them better insight because of the fact that they can actually have those tags on the data that are really important to them.
And then control huge. You know again back to budgets match matching actuals, you can track, you can easily reforecast. So you're making sure you're staying within your budget. Donors, donors and funders intent being able to have a dimension.
That's going to align with the compliance reporting you need for your funders or just for the fact that you've got some some maybe endowment fund or you've got very specific designations for donor funds that you need to manage against. That's what what dimensions bring to the table.
Accountability across teams. Because of the fact that you can get quite granular, you can really drive accountability because things can be very specific to certain individuals or programs or sub programs and then finance and program alignment like once you start to be able to.
To do that, you're going to have better alignment because you're going to be able to help your team be a little more financially literate because they have that meaning to their data. Then a couple of other things Jennifer didn't cover, but I'd like to chat about are workflow approvals and security access.
Honestly, this was probably the thing we're seeing the most with the customers that we work with is that it's not just about all the reporting. They really need workflow approvals. They really want to be able to have the.
Audit controls in place to ensure that the spend management is there, things are approved and it's all documented. So having a dimension allows you to do that because you can you can assign, you can use those dimensions to assign certain departments or certain funds.
And the people that are responsible for those along with the spending limits. So dimensions are key to creating the approval workflows, but also the security access again with certainly and we'll speak to our system, but you can get very granular on what things people.
People can see when you've got dimensions in place and a lot of the customers we talk to, they come to us and they're not able to do that and that is certainly a pretty pressing priority in today's world. And this also kind of covers that approval matrix where you've now got and.
Men and it's back to what Jennifer was talking about. You've got locations, you've got departments and then you're you're able to get that granular that only and this is so small for me right now I can't read it, but I'm sure you can that only you know is it John Meg that can can approve John St.
For for admin. So that those are really key things that dimensions offer beyond just reporting.
And related to this, better audits, you know, again, consistent coding and Kinley's going to talk a little bit about how you achieve that, but being able to have these dimensions that allow you to have a lot of consistency and clear restrictions as I just talked about around.
What people can approve, what people can see, and actual accurate functional expenses. What we uncover and what we hear from our customers is when they've moved from a traditional segmented GL to this logical dimensional GL, they have fewer errors and fewer adjustments.
Assessments because of the way that you can use those dimension combinations. And then I've touched on this before, but modern reporting. You're going to have meaningful dashboards because they're built on clean dimensional data. They allow you to slice and dice back to that pivot table analogy. They allow you.
To slice and dice so that you actually get more meaning in your data. And this is very much related to the KPIs under those dashboards. And then again, because we have less errors, as I talked about, you have better controls.
You're gonna actually ultimately have more reliable financial statements that are quicker to generate and and less less errors.
OK. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Kinley, who's going to talk about some of the habits that that I guess are best practice and what we've seen with our with our customers.

Kinley Graham   25:45
So when it comes to these decisions, you have to sit down and think about what you're trying to accomplish. So if you just go one more forward for me there, just gonna I'm sorry. So when when we sit down and you actually start thinking about what dimensions you need.

Meg Wilson   25:57
Yep.

Kinley Graham   26:04
You're going to feel like there's lots of solutions and there's lots of things you're trying to solve. The best thing to do is figure out what you think you might want to track and start writing those down and figuring out what those would be. Those can be based on, as Meg and Jennifer said, it could be based on governance requirements, approval.
It could be special projects, it could be lots of different things, and you really do have the ability to slice and dice all your data based on just one of those values in one of the dimensions and immediately get a useful report that tells you what you need to know.
So when you're going and doing this, you're going to create the dimensions that you you you think you need. When you look at them, there's going to be a bunch of them and you're going to want to make sure you're not going too far. So sometimes you have to pair back, sometimes you need to add extra as time goes on and it's a process you're going to want to go through.
Now, as you're doing this, you want to have items that are very clear. When I spoke about the order, where it gets interesting is you you want to go from a macro to a micro point of view usually, but you want to keep in mind the dimensions you pick that aren't always required.
So something like a project dimension is not something that would necessarily be required on everything. So for our customers, we usually recommend that being the final dimension in the series because there are certain cases where it would be required and others where it's not.
So going through and figuring out which dimensions you need and the value they provide, and then putting them in an order that makes sense is really critical to what you're trying to accomplish. Once you've kind of figured that out, though, you have to figure out next how you're going to pick and maintain the dimension values within that dimension.
And this is really important because two people could understand the purpose of the naming of a dimension differently. But if you create a standard practice for how the names are created in the codes, it makes things a lot simpler, a lot cleaner. You don't get redundancy, you don't have to then migrate history. You have a clear process for for creating them.
And a naming convention that goes with that. Beyond that, you you then would want to have this series of procedures that you're going to go through when you want to update them, you want to remove them. Instead of removing them, you would usually block them so you could continue to report on them.
But you want to have a standard procedure and a person that owns the doing that, along with the proper audit controls that go along with it. From there, the the final piece in all of this is building reports that people actually use. So when you go back and you look at these dimensions that you've created and what you're trying to accomplish, you can then take that as a map.
For what reports that you want to create where this would provide the absolute maximum value. Those reports will continue to grow and evolve over time, but having that identification of how they tied into the dimensions and what you want to use them for is critically important.
So the next thing we're we're just gonna kinda move into talking about some of our experiences and some of our experience like some of the things that we've seen with with customers or in our previous employments.
I'm not sure if I Meg or Jennifer want to jump in here with an example 1st and.

Jennifer Hume   29:20
Sure, I'll start with with my I've got you know an example that when I did my first implementation you know as Kinley you know talked about you have to try to you know kind of figure out what you want and and it can you know can be overwhelming so.
I started out with three dimensions. It was a program, so I had like a supported independent living and like a shift staff home. So those were my programs. And then I had branches and they were actually like locations. So in hindsight I would probably call them locations now, but.
And then I had a third one, which was a revenue dimension. So you know, federal funder, regional funders or local funders. So that worked for probably about five or six years. I believe Kinley was actually my.
Finance consultant in my last implementation and and we actually at that point came up with I believe it was two more dimensions that I was going to create. One was for participants because we were getting a lot more requests from our funders to do reporting just specifically on a specific.
Individual like someone that we were serving and then the other one was an employee. So you know those were ways that you know you start somewhere and then you can build on it. And then the last example that that I will use is.
During the pandemic, the organization that I worked for was using the software and of course our funders are like, we need to know, you know, every penny that you spent on on COVID. So that's we created a, you know, a COVID dimension and.
You know, it was easy enough to do to create that to, you know, to get that out to the people doing the coding that if it's COVID, you use this this dimension. And I'm not saying that the reporting was super easy, but it was a lot easier than what our sister organizations that would take weeks.
To try to pull together all of the information, you know, going line by line on a trial balance, trying to figure out what was COVID related and you know, so it was, it was certainly easier for us because we had that that dimension. I just did all my examples all at once, so.

Kinley Graham   31:34
That's that's great. Can you could you jump one slide forward there, Meg?
You're muted.
OK. So I I wanted to go forward one slide here just to bring up something that Jennifer had talked about there. When it came to participant, I I came from a supported and assisted living background. So for me this employee dimension, there is definitely value there when you have.
When you have different transactions that you want to tag onto individual employees, but where I came from, we used it as similar to participant. We called it individual and the advantage here was when you had person centered funding, we could actually tie from the time entry that a person would submit.
Those entries to a specific individual for recouping funding from the government. And when we wanted to do that, it was simply just filtering to that individual's entries over the last 12 months or three months, whatever the invoicing timeline was, and I could get the exact number for what it was.
And the beauty here and you see it in the image is that employee in this case is the very last one or if individual or I spoke about project earlier is the last one, we had set it up as optional dimensions for all three of those purposes. And when they're optional, it really means they are optional. So when you have transactions that don't.
Tie to a specific individual or a specific project. You just don't include that in the dimension string and that means it wouldn't be included in the reporting that would include that dimension. It adds a huge level of power and flexibility when it comes to quick reporting. It really enables self-service.
And self-service is something we're all after because we're all super busy and it frees up a ridiculous amount of time.
Megan, I'm not sure if you had anything else in there.
You're still muted.

Meg Wilson   33:33
Well, thanks Kinley. Yes, we also have a lot of clients that have to do compliance reporting, statement of financial information in BC. There's various names of various reports across the country. But the bottom line is they need to track the travel expenses by employee. So you know and and it gets granular like.
You know they they they have a pizza lunch and there's eight pieces of pizza and that that that has to be tied to each of those eight people eating that pizza. So being able to have that employee dimension on there has been huge for those clients to be able to create the reporting without spending like Jennifer you mentioned.
Your colleagues during COVID spending weeks, you know, pulling that together. So it is very powerful.
All right. So Bree, I think you're going to, you're going to take control of the Q&A. We'd love, we really want to have some open dialogue. That's why we've left lots of time for that. People post questions and then and then I think in a couple minutes we may even.

Bri-anna Ramsden   34:34
Yeah.

Meg Wilson   34:45
Open it up if people want to verbally ask their question. But while you think about your questions and while you put your questions in the chat, I am going to Oh no, actually I think that's in the wrong place, so.
I think Kinley, you were gonna talk about next step.

Bri-anna Ramsden   35:02
Oh.
Yes, Kenley quickly is gonna talk about next steps and then we're heading into the Q&A.

Kinley Graham   35:07
Sorry. See, that's what happens. Sorry about that. So the next steps, if it was me, I would be going and looking at what governance needs I currently have. I would go and see.

Meg Wilson   35:11
Yeah.

Kinley Graham   35:22
What my ministry reporting is like or my funder reporting is like? What grant reporting is like? Do I have special projects that need to be reported on holistically going through and reviewing those key items that I need to report on in a timely manner?
I would go through and I would look at budget ownership. Is budget split up currently by departments with clear budget owners? That would be a huge identifier for how you want to break it up at a higher level. You want to look at approvals. Approvals are really huge right now.
Audit is always looking at approval thresholds. Are they open? Are they closed? Is there an over budget approval, all that kind of stuff. So going and looking at the structure of what approvals should be in place for corporate governance or outside governance would be a great also thing to add when you're trying to figure out what your landscape looks like.
And any other requirements you currently have, sometimes there's board members, sometimes there's leaders, sometimes there's just managers. The way you're grouping up the data and what requirements exist from a compliance standpoint and a reporting standpoint, I would take that and then I would go review what pain points currently exist from things that have happened recently, you know, recent audits.
Recent board meetings, recent funder discussions, recent grants. The landscape is changing a fair bit, so documenting all that stuff now makes a lot of sense. Figure out what you need. Now the hardest thing is not jumping in and doing it right away.
I It's great to get it out there. It's great that we're all gonna be excited to be able to do all this stuff. But what we've noticed over years of doing this is that things change depending on where you are in the year. I know myself, you you close the year only once a year you go through an audit.
Once a year. So making this decision and not taking things into account like different times of the year and different requirements and different things, it it it's a little bit of a mistake. So you want to construct this, you want to review it with your team, made a little bit of time so that it's in people's minds and they're thinking about it and then meet again and review what you've decided.
How would that apply to the things that have happened? Things going on? Do you need something additional? Is it too much? Is it the wrong direction? Like these kind of things are stuff that you can pre you can pre plan and you can revisit a few times to narrow down what exactly you need to do.
And then go from there to construct a checklist, which we're going to send you after this meeting is or this webinar. There's going to be some follow up items and one of those is to kind of go through a process like that and you want to document it.
Documentation is my enemy. I'm not very great at it. People always have to give me a hard time about writing stuff down. But it really does help when you're trying to make decisions like this, because you can go back and see what you wrote down, why you did it this way, and now you feel different, and then make an educated decision and go forward with the right set of dimensions that you want to go.
Go with and this is something that we help customers with all the time as a part of the project when they initialize the project and they start going.
I'll hand that back over.

Meg Wilson   38:26
Great. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks, Kim. So now let's chat. So we're going to get into some general Q&A, but to kind of start off that discussion, you know, if you could change one thing about your financial organization structure, example, the chart of accounts, what would it be? So we'd just love to hear what?

Bri-anna Ramsden   38:28
And now, yes.

Meg Wilson   38:46
what you struggle with and what you would change and any other questions you have. And while you put your thoughts together, I am just going to, you know, a quick message from your sponsor, SparkRock, and and this team. I have already spoken about SparkRock at the beginning
Of this session and told you a bit about who we are and what we do. But I also wanted to bring to your attention that we have a really unique approach to dimensions. So as part of our ERP offering, we have this feature called Account Sets and Account Sets add flexibility control in.
Simplify the use of dimensions and Kinley likes to call them speed keys. So what they do when we've talked about these dimensions and the combinations, they create some combinations that are things that you use all the time or things that your program managers, they just want something simple. They are not account.
Tell me what I need, only the accounts that I'm allowed to spend against, and that's all I want. And that's something that we, through working with our nonprofit clients, found that was really important. So we developed account sets many, many years ago and we consistently hear that that is.
Something super powerful for the nonprofits we work with and I don't know Kinley if you want to add anything to that, but.

Kinley Graham   40:14
It's a very it's a it's a useful tool and it allows you to control which series of dimensions work together. Sometimes you might have a project that you don't want associated with a certain fund and it allows you to clearly create that relationship, make it so a person enters 1 field and they end up.
With getting the whole string, it really, really reduces the errors.
This is theirs.

Meg Wilson   40:39
Great. Thanks, Kinley.

Jennifer Hume   40:41
Yeah, it and just to to to build on that like when in finance or accounting, you know the the biggest headache that we have, one of the biggest headaches is when program people code things.

Meg Wilson   40:44
Yeah.

Jennifer Hume   40:58
And they just code it to whatever and they don't really know, you know, which string to use. And so then account, you know, accounting, we're always going back and we're checking to make sure the coding's right or it gets posted and then we have to do entries to change it. So this is account sets. This is the beauty of account sets because you can have.
These account set numbers can be alphanumeric, so they can you can create them so that when that user sees that accounts that they're like, Oh yeah, that's what I want, you know the program and and you know the expense and then behind that behind the scenes.
That account set is adding all those other dimensions that the program people don't care about, but finance does because we have to report on them. So that's that's really the the the beauty of of the account sets is giving those end users.
The tools to make better decisions.

Bri-anna Ramsden   41:51
And I can second that as the non-finance person here who's had to put expenses in. It is so much nicer not having to guess it than having accounting come and yell at me later. So take that from your marketing friend.

Kinley Graham   41:57
Yeah.

Meg Wilson   42:01
Yeah.

Jennifer Hume   42:06
We'd never yell at anybody.

Bri-anna Ramsden   42:07
Totally not. Absolutely not.

Jennifer Hume   42:09
I'm looking at Kinley's face.

Kinley Graham   42:09
No, never.

Meg Wilson   42:16
Well, and and Bree, I think you were going to put a link in the chat if anyone wants any more information about Sparkrock and want to learn more about account sets in particular. And you know, here's a here's a small sample of some of our customers that have been able to realize the power of using account sets.
Now, do we have any questions?

Bri-anna Ramsden   42:41
Feel free to raise your hand, put them in the chat or the Q&A. If you have questions about dimensions or even specific use cases, ask away.

Jennifer Hume   42:50
Or.
Yeah, or yeah, or ask us, right. You've got, you know, you've got people from from Spark Rock here and we wanted to to leave time so that we can actually have a conversation, you know, with people if you have questions and and really it'll make.

Meg Wilson   42:52
Yeah.

Jennifer Hume   43:08
It it makes the webinar so much more valuable to everybody here, you know, if we can, if we can get some feedback. So I'm hoping that maybe.

Meg Wilson   43:15
And that and that first, that first poll, it sounded like everybody was struggling with everything on that list. So, so there's there's definitely people on this call that are that are struggling with some of the things that we believe dimensions can help address.

Jennifer Hume   43:33
Well, and even the the results, I'm just looking here about the how many dimensions you think you'd require to effectively manage your organization like 72% said between 4:00 and 6:00, which that is the sweet spot, right? That is.
Where it's manageable, account sets work great 'cause if you get more than, you know, what is it Kinley? I think it's 8 dimensions in an account set.

Kinley Graham   44:00
Yeah, it's eight in line, but you can technically have unlimited dimensions within the system.

Jennifer Hume   44:01
Right, so.
Right. But your yeah, your your accounting people may not be too happy if you have. Oh, we have a question. I'm gonna stop talking.

Meg Wilson   44:05
Yeah.

Kinley Graham   44:07
Oh, we got a hand up.

Meg Wilson   44:08
Yeah.

Kinley Graham   44:14
That's right.

Meg Wilson   44:14
Wanna unmute? Maybe we can unmute Ken here.

Kinley Graham   44:17
Let's unmute him.

Ken Sauve   44:21
Hi. Hi there. Can you hear me? Yes, sorry, thanks. I so I have a question, but I don't know if it's going to take us into the weeds or not. So feel free to just tell me that's a question for another day. But when we're talking and I missed the first few minutes of the presentation, so when we're talking about like the.

Meg Wilson   44:22
There we go. Yes, Ben.

Kinley Graham   44:23
Yeah.

Jennifer Hume   44:23
Yeah.

Ken Sauve   44:40
Dimensions in your terms, like it looks like we're really talking about segments of the GL is am I off base there or you got a new way of approaching that?

Kinley Graham   44:50
So it's like taking the segmented GL and breaking it up. So in your segmented GL, I'm assuming you've got a bunch of different parts. You probably have something that's to do with a location. There's probably something to do with something like a grant or a funder or a project. You have the raw, the raw natural.

Ken Sauve   45:00
Yeah.
Correct. Yeah.

Kinley Graham   45:09
GL account, as we call it, you know, when we when we went to school and we learned about accounting, they gave us those workbooks. Actually, I'm going way back in time now. It's probably all on the computer, but they gave us that workbook with the Ledger and our little T accounts and all that fun stuff, right? You know, assets are 10 thousands, liabilities are 20 thousands, all that fun stuff.
So basically it's like stripping out that GL account and you've got your raw chart of accounts. So in the image right here, it's just the account column. So you've just got that account column. That's your raw chart of accounts. In our system, you can go to the raw chart of accounts, just plug in one dimension value and it'll immediately update that entire chart of accounts, the budget.

Ken Sauve   45:35
Mhm.

Kinley Graham   45:47
The net change, the commitment and the encumbrance and the remaining budget all right there. All you do is pick the value and it's done.
Historically, if you had segmented GLS, you know what a pain in the **** that is because you have to go and you'd have to add like the 26 different segmented GLS that added up to that total. When you enter them as separate values for each of the segments, it allows you to slice and dice the data immediately without having to total up the accounts.
That was a very long winded answer.

Jennifer Hume   46:15
So, so my the short answer, I'll summarize it. When I did, when I did my very first implementation in 2009, I had a very similar to what's on the screen there segmented GL so.

Meg Wilson   46:20
OK.

Ken Sauve   46:20
It.

Kinley Graham   46:20
Portfol.

Jennifer Hume   46:33
What we did was we we had obviously the natural account, right, like your your GL account and then we just took the segments and that was our first dimensions like literally it was as simple as that. And then like as I said like when I was talking, you know over time we added.

Ken Sauve   46:40
Mhm.

Meg Wilson   46:43
Yes.

Jennifer Hume   46:49
Dimensions because once you start working with them and understand and you're like, oh wow, let's let's hang a dimension on there so that we we can report on this. So there's like a starting point and if you have a long segmented GL, chances are that's that's where you're going to where you're going to start and the other thing that.
That we always, you know, talk about and Meg talked about is the reporting right now when when I was when we were looking at creating a chart of accounts and we had a structured way of reporting, we had to report on, you know, this object and this location.
And it was very, very structured. So that's the way that we we created the dimensions in that situation, so.

Ken Sauve   47:35
So in in this case then just so I'm understanding quickly, so I I I guess you're talking about I don't have to enter the whole segment. So if I just want to know about the natural, I go to the natural. I want to know if I wanted to summarize on location, I can just enter the location dimension or segment is whatever or let's say grants if I just want to look at total grants.
For a specific grant, you're saying I don't have to enter all the string, I just go straight to the one, the summarized level that concerns me at that moment, OK.

Kinley Graham   48:04
Yeah, yeah, you can definitely do it that way. And like and.

Ken Sauve   48:07
OK, I'm I'm used to. I'm used to dimensions inside of a cubed environment. So is it similar? Yeah, OK.

Kinley Graham   48:12
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's like slicing and dicing a cube. It's like a pivot table.

Ken Sauve   48:19
Right. So I'm, I'm just, oh, sorry, I'm just trying to get the difference between like say the system we're in now versus how it works in yours where if I want something I have to go through all segments of the string if there's five segments in our GL. So I've got to enter those to get to whatever sort of slice. It's very hard to slice in some cases because of that.

Kinley Graham   48:20
So it it.
Yeah.

Ken Sauve   48:39
So you're saying with this I can just say well if I want to know just all all the segment of I don't know by by well by see by fund etcetera is kind of easy but like if it's if I want to get down into.
Projects was a good example. Then I can just go straight there and skip all the rest of the segments.

Jennifer Hume   49:01
So, so just just to to give you hopefully maybe you can visualize it. So you think about your chart of accounts, right, like in any accounting system. So close your eyes, you're in your chart of accounts, I'm in program supplies, I'm going to hit my actuals and then it comes up with this big spreadsheet and then.

Kinley Graham   49:01
Yeah.

Jennifer Hume   49:19
You go to a filter and you say I just want to know for program supplies. I just want to know project whatever and that's it. Like literally you would be there in seconds. Kinley.

Ken Sauve   49:24
Yes.
OK.

Kinley Graham   49:30
Yeah, it it really is that simple. When you look at it like a it, it's different. If you look at it like a cubed environment, it's multiple data elements tagged onto 1 record. That's really what it is.

Jennifer Hume   49:34
Yeah.

Kinley Graham   49:44
And you can go and say I want all the records that have this element for this date range and immediately it will just give it to you. You're not going and adding items together.

Ken Sauve   49:52
OK.
So I just like, you know, I'm just trying to picture it and make a sense of mine. It's like a robust filtering put on top of your geo. Yeah. OK. Thank you.

Kinley Graham   49:59
Yes. Oh yeah, totally. Completely.

Jennifer Hume   50:00
And then from there you could put it in Excel, you could send it to Kinley over teams. I could create a link and send Meg the the the link to it and as long as they have the right permissions.

Ken Sauve   50:00
Yeah.

Kinley Graham   50:05
Oh yeah.
Yeah, yeah.

Jennifer Hume   50:16
Right. Kinley looks in teams and says, oh, Jen says I got to take a look at my my program. Click goes right into it. Oh, oh, I got to do something about this. Like it's it's literally it's it's it's quick like that.

Ken Sauve   50:17
Mhm.

Kinley Graham   50:30
Yep.

Ken Sauve   50:30
Great. Thanks. Thank you.

Kinley Graham   50:32
It the other thing here is that when you look at budgeting, it allows you to have budgets at different levels. You could budget for the 1st 3 dimensions only and have all your numbers roll up into those amounts and you could do your approvals based on budget to actuals at that point.
You could go fully granular right down to the project level of a budget and have a budget specifically for a certain project and do an immediate budget to actual comparison just on that project instead of getting all the other noise included.
It really creates a flexibility in your data to configure all of this the way that you need to make your reporting as self-service and quick as possible.

Meg Wilson   51:13
That's a really good example, Kinley, because I know in my old world I was on a segmented GL Great Plains for anyone that's using Great Plains years ago and we had to budget every line item and and we didn't need that, but you had to. So a lot of them were were were guesses.
But we we really didn't care. We only cared about the total for that particular area.

Kinley Graham   51:35
I found that one of my examples was I had two different year ends because of different funders. One was the Ministry of Community and Social Services and one was a regional funder. My funder that was regional was a December 31st year end and my MCSS year end was March 31st.
So being able to tag all my information with these different data elements, even with the different year ends, I could easily run a report on a specific data element for whatever date period I wanted and immediately get out the report I needed to give back to that organization.
It just made things so fast to be able to just pull based on one value and get everything you need.
Thank you for asking a question. By the way, you you saved everybody from having to listen to me talk about cars or other random stuff, so thank you.

Jennifer Hume   52:23
Yes, thank you. Yay, Ken. Yeah.

Meg Wilson   52:23
Thank you. Thank you.
Well, and Michael had a really good comment around dimensions are huge when your segment ends up being used for multiple purposes for sure. Yes, filters on.

Jennifer Hume   52:30
Ha.

Kinley Graham   52:40
Oh, yeah.

Meg Wilson   52:42
And when you just need temporary things like like Jennifer's example with COVID, because it traditional GL, your GL will just grow and grow and grow. Being able to have dimensions is this this really great chart shows means that you're going to have a more manageable.
Chart of accounts.

Kinley Graham   53:00
Another use for this that doesn't come up too often, but if your auditors come to you and they're like right now your salaries account can't have your full-time employees with your part-time, we want to see that broken down right now. If you're using a segmented GL, I can assume you're all going to nod with me.
That setting that up would be a freaking nightmare because you're going to have to copy all the segmented GLS you had for your original salaries and create all new segmented GLS for that new GL account for part time salaries. That is one time consuming pain in the ****.
In a solution that's fully dimensionalized like this, all you would do is create the natural GL account and you could actually be done because your approvals are likely based on a different dimension. You would immediately have available to you all of those other dimension values.
If you wanted to have controls in place, you would use the account set functionality that Meg spoke about and you could create the restrictions for which dimensions are allowed together. It's way better than sitting there and inserting all these individual new segmented GLS going to your reports, taking all the accounts and changing the way they total create.
New totals for all those segmented GLS. Like for the last 10 years I've seen customers go over this and over this and over this and when they hit dimensions and they actually have them, they would never go back. It really, really works that well.

Jennifer Hume   54:29
Yeah. And once you have that permission for, you know, for a dimension, you know, adding, you know, additional dimensions like it, it just makes everything so fast, right? That that, yeah, it definitely makes makes your life a little easier.

Kinley Graham   54:47
Oh, and same goes for the approvals. You're gonna add a new department because you've got new funding or you've got a new grant. You're just gonna add that one grant to the system. You're gonna add the grant value. You're gonna go to your approval matrix and you're gonna say we wanna have an approval on this new grant. Meg's gonna be the first approver.
Jennifer's gonna be the second. If it goes over 10,000, close the page and you should now set up your approvals for that new grant. It really speeds things up and I keep harping on the enable self-service, but it really does. Self-service saves you all time.

Meg Wilson   55:23
Thanks, Kinley. Thanks, Jennifer. We've only got a few minutes remaining. I don't see any other questions unless there's some that that you see, Bree.

Bri-anna Ramsden   55:36
I don't see any, but I will quickly sum up what we went over today. So we chatted about how dimensions can play a strategic role in improving your reporting and budgeting, some of the common issues in your current use of dimensions, how dimensions can strengthen governance and control across your financial processes.

Kinley Graham   55:37
Yeah.

Bri-anna Ramsden   55:56
To evaluate your organization's current dimension structure, how to apply dimension concepts to real life finance scenarios like approvals, budgeting, reporting, and some practical next steps. So if you don't have any more questions, I do want you to keep your eye out for your e-mail. We'll be sending this webinar.
But I will also be sending you some checklists to help you in case you are interested in changing up your strategy or if you're looking for a new ERP. I hope you enjoyed our commercial break. Had to put that in there funny somehow, but we really appreciate you all coming out.

Meg Wilson   56:29
Yeah.

Bri-anna Ramsden   56:31
And you can always reach out to us. You can visit our website, reach out through our contact form or e-mail us at connect@sparkrock.com. Thank you Jen, Meg and Kinley. Always a pleasure. And I like learning about finance too.
And now I don't have to do it, so that's all that matters.

Meg Wilson   56:52
Thanks everyone. Thanks for joining us today.

Jennifer Hume   56:54
Yeah, thank you.