Local Motion Improves Funder Reporting and Drives Operational Efficiencies with ClickTime

Industry: Nonprofit

Local Motion

Customer Challenges:

  • Tracking time in Excel was manual and laborious
  • Limited understanding of employee availability
  • Need for comprehensive reporter funding

ClickTime Benefits:

  • Reduced operational costs
  • More accurate budgeting, forecasting, and program staffing
  • Significantly improved reporting to funders

Local Motion is a member-supported nonprofit whose mission is to bring an active life within reach for all Vermonters by helping communities become great places to walk and bike. With many programs to manage, and a need to provide detailed reporting to funders, Local Motion turned to ClickTime to offer insights into operations and employee availability, and improve reporting and communications with funders.

Operating More Efficiently

By entering time in a centralized system, Local Motion was able to save time, reduce costs, and create more efficient processes — all of which enable them to better deliver on their mission.

"We used to compile spreadsheets manually and send them off to our payroll processor at the end of every month," recalls Jason Van Driesche, Director of Advocacy & Education at Local Motion. "We had to collect every spreadsheet and tediously put it together. We were losing about 10 - 12 hours per billing cycle manually collecting this data."

But it wasn't just more efficient data collection that ClickTime offered. The time tracking platform enabled Local Motion to gain a much deeper understanding of their operations and use of funder resources.

"Before ClickTime, we would closely watch our grants and hours billed — one grant at a time — but we would be blind to just about everything else," said Van Driesche. "We can now track our funding sources extremely closely. And the immediacy of the feedback we receive from our data is invaluable. It's in your face. We can drill down into the most granular details and find data that's just critical."

"ClickTime has been amazing for us," said Van Driesche. "Conservatively, ClickTime has saved us about 150 hours per year, freeing us up to spend this time furthering our mission."

Jason Van Driesche headshot

“Using ClickTime, fund and grant reporting is amazingly simple. We're able to enter our hours and include detailed comments about our tasks, and have reports to grantors in seconds — all ready to go without any further modifications.”

— Jason Van Driesche, Deputy Director at Local Motion

Improved Management of Staff and Budgets

In addition to the time tracking and business automation, Local Motion realized that they could leverage the data in ClickTime for their estimation and budgeting needs.

"We found the budgeting and estimation we were looking for in ClickTime's Resource Planning tool," said Van Driesche. "Even though we have complex grant allocations and contributions coming from a wide variety of funding sources, ClickTime kept us on budget."

Some of Local Motion's work is billable to grants and contracts, whereas other initiatives are mission-drive or funded by member dollars. Clicktime provides a comprehensive analysis of employee time that results in more effective use of grantor funds.

"We rely on ClickTime to get a real understanding of how we spend our time over the course of the year, and how we can budget that time for the future," said Van Driesche. "Now we're able to effectively allocate staff time," said Van Driesche. "It's easy to distribute our volunteer hours and workload to optimize our grantor budgets."

Better Reporting to Funders

It's critical that Local Motion provides accurate and comprehensive reports to its funders. This includes how much time and money was spent on given programs, and what activities were performed.

"Using ClickTime, fund and grant reporting is amazingly simple," said Van Driesche. "We're able to enter our hours and include detailed comments about our tasks, and have reports to grantors in seconds — all ready to go without any further modifications.

Since the implementation ClickTime, Local Motion has realized a number of reporting efficiencies that benefit employees, volunteers, and grantors.

"ClickTime is a huge time saver. We can exports reports from ClickTime as PDFs and share them with our funders as documentation of activities completed," said Van Driesche.

Exceptional Support and Ease of Use

Before becoming a ClickTime customer, Local Motion began an end-to-end assessment of ClickTime's time tracking and reporting features. The team was equally impressed with the technology and the level of support and nonprofit expertise that ClickTime offered.

"We evaluated ClickTime for a few weeks and immediately we knew that there was no turning back," said Van Driesche. "We had all of our jobs and tasks set up into the system and everything was just so easy."

"ClickTime Support was amazing. To us, it was unusual to encounter this level of service. The support staff was consistently quick and responsive. Everyone we spoke with was really knowledgeable and helpful," said Van Driesche.

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