A Move to Sage Intacct Gave St. Ursula Academy a Strong Operational Foundation
The Challenge
St. Ursula Academy had outgrown its legacy financial setup. Reporting took too much manual effort, controls needed to be tighter, and routine work, like posting tuition activity and reconciling multiple bank accounts, ate up time that should have gone to analysis, planning, and supporting the school community.
The Solution
St. Ursula partnered with DWD Technology Group to move to Sage Intacct and modernize finance with a long-term view. DWD helped simplify the chart of accounts, use dimensions to track departments, funds, programs, and initiatives without account sprawl, and connect key systems to reduce manual work.
The Results of Sage Intacct
The team quickly saw ROI in the form of less manual work, faster cycles, and better visibility across the school.
- Cut bank reconciliations from 3–5 days to less than 1 day, saving 16–32 hours per month.
- Integration with tuition management software saves 6–8 hours per week.
- Shortened a monthly close process that could stretch into weeks into a tighter, more predictable cycle.
- Improved budget visibility for 60+ departments and programs with dimension-based reporting.
- Simplified purchasing and payables, reducing receipt chasing and strengthening the audit trail.
- Strengthened vendor payments and cash timing through more ACH and payments scheduled closer to due dates.
St. Ursula Academy has been shaping confident, educated young women for more than a century. Founded in 1910, the school has stayed true to a mission that feels both timeless and urgently current: helping students find their voice, build a strong value system, and step into the world ready to lead.
Location: Ohio, USA
Sage Partner: DWD Technology Group
Industry: Nonprofit
With Sage Intacct and DWD, the school modernized finance, reclaimed time, and improved visibility—while protecting every tuition and donor dollar.
A mission this meaningful deserves a strong operational foundation
For Jodi Clever, Vice President of Operations, that mission is personal. She’s spent 22 years at St. Ursula, long enough to watch generations of students grow into the kind of women who advocate for themselves and make a difference in their communities. Her own daughter is graduating this year.
“I get to see it from every angle,” Jodi says. “As an employee and as a parent, you watch these girls come in, and then you watch them blossom. They become more confident, more grounded, more willing to speak up. It’s incredible.”
But even mission-driven organizations need a strong operational footing. And for years, St. Ursula’s finance team had been working harder than they should have to produce the information the school needed.
A system that couldn’t keep up with the school
When Jodi joined St. Ursula, the school was running on Microsoft Dynamics GP. It worked, but reporting was clunky and time-consuming. The team spent too much energy manipulating data — exporting, reconciling, and rebuilding the story in spreadsheets — when what they really needed was more time for analysis and planning.
“We had a skilled team,” Jodi explains. “And I hated how much of their day was spent chasing information instead of doing value-added work.”
Like many organizations, St. Ursula had been talking about change for years. But the daily demands of a busy high school don’t pause for an ERP project. Between managing facilities, risk, and people, the idea of switching financial systems felt daunting.
Then a combination of factors pushed the decision from “someday” to “now.” A bank change created momentum. And a security issue involving a former employee highlighted the need for stronger controls and clearer visibility.
“We had reached a point where we couldn’t keep avoiding it,” Jodi says. “We needed better control. Better reporting. More peace of mind.”
Choosing a partner who spoke their language
Jodi started by reaching out to Clark Schaefer Hackett, the organization’s accounting firm, and talking with other nonprofits and schools about what they were using. Sage Intacct kept coming up as a standout option.
But what mattered just as much as the software was the implementation partner. Jodi wanted someone who understood how a school operates, how nonprofits think about stewardship, and why nice-to-have features don’t matter if they come with unnecessary cost.
That’s when the accounting firm introduced her to DWD Technology Group. “DWD didn’t come in with a bunch of tech talk,” Jodi says. “They spoke our language. They understood the controls we need, the way we have to account for funds, and the reality that every dollar matters — because it ultimately comes from families and donors.”
From the earliest conversations, Jodi felt confident about the path forward.
“The DWD team understood where we were and where we wanted to go,” she adds. “We never felt oversold. They helped us focus on what we needed right now, and they were clear about what we could grow into later. That gave us a lot of comfort.”
Rebuilding the foundation with the future in mind
One of the earliest decisions was to restructure the chart of accounts. St. Ursula’s legacy structure had grown over time and had become unsustainable. DWD helped the team reduce it, rethink the structure, and map what mattered into Sage Intacct in a way that would serve the school long-term.
“It was a little nerve-wracking at first,” Jodi admits. “But DWD helped us look at it in a fresh way and showed us the benefits we’d see by simplifying the structure. We knew we needed something better, and we had the right people to help us set it up for the future.”
That future-focused structure came to life through dimensions within Sage Intacct. St. Ursula manages complexity that doesn’t fit neatly into a traditional account-code approach: roughly 60 departments, student clubs, parent and booster activities, scholarship funds, mini-organizations, locations, and multiple funds and entities — including an umbrella scholarship-granting organization.
Using dimensions and projects, the finance team can track initiatives without creating a maze of new accounts. Jodi points to the school’s “mini-mesters” as a perfect example: deep-dive, two-week learning experiences that could have required dozens of new accounts under the old model.
“In one season, we had 40 mini-mesters,” she says. “In our old system, that would have meant 40 new accounts, and we never would have done it. Now we can track those programs cleanly and actually learn from the data.”
A finance modernization that people actually feel
The most visible operational shift came through payables and spend management. With DWD’s help, St. Ursula integrated Ramp, transforming how staff handle purchases, receipts, and approvals, and removing a lot of friction from day-to-day work.
Jodi noticed the ripple effect right away. With fewer receipts to chase and fewer reimbursement loops, people can capture a receipt in seconds, code it correctly, and keep moving — without creating more work for the business office. “Faculty and staff love it,” Jodi says. “It’s easier, it’s cleaner, and it’s so much more efficient.”
Teachers also have their own cards and a simple process for submitting what they need, so they’re not paying out of pocket or worrying that paperwork will go missing. Receipts and invoices are attached digitally, creating an audit-ready trail with fewer touches.
“It sounds small until you see how it changes the experience for people,” Jodi says. “Teachers have enough on their plates. This helps them, and it’s a morale boost. It signals the trust and respect we have for them.”
It also helped the school reduce duplication and costs around purchasing, such as consolidating multiple Amazon accounts into a single Amazon Business account.
ROI that shows up in time, accuracy, and trust
While the full-year-over-year time savings will be clearest after the school completes a full cycle in the new system, St. Ursula is already seeing meaningful ROI — both in measurable results and in what the team can do with the time they’ve won back.
Month-end used to be a longer, more manual push, sometimes stretching into multiple weeks. With Sage Intacct and cleaner workflows, the team is tightening that cycle and spending more time reviewing what the numbers mean, not hunting them down.
One standout example is bank reconciliation. St. Ursula manages 12 bank accounts. Previously, reconciliation could take an assistant three to five days, or longer, depending on the month. Now, Jodi can complete all 12 reconciliations in less than a day. “At first I didn’t believe it,” she laughs. “When DWD told us we’d be done that quickly, I thought, ‘Yeah… right.’ But it’s real.”
Integrations are also delivering immediate gains. By connecting its tuition management application and setting up subledger accounts for family payments, the team eliminated manual posting that used to consume a significant chunk of time. Jodi estimates the school is saving the better part of a day each week — time that now goes back into more proactive communication with families, more support for enrollment, and more room to plan rather than react.
And with streamlined payment processing, St. Ursula is paying vendors more promptly (often via ACH), earning compliments for responsiveness, and even improving cash management by scheduling payments to land closer to due dates, keeping funds in the account longer and increasing earnings.
DWD feels like part of our team
DWD’s responsiveness, plus the depth of talent behind it, has helped St. Ursula keep moving forward, even after go-live.
For Jodi, it isn’t just the response time; it’s the real depth behind the response, from people who understand accounting realities and can help St. Ursula keep improving how work flows. She’d heard from peers who didn’t have that kind of experience with other firms — another reminder that the partner can make or break the value of the software.
“DWD is just an email away,” Jodi says. “We have a main point of contact, but there’s always backup. The depth matters. They help us solve issues quickly, and they’re encouraging throughout the process.”
That support has extended beyond implementation. St. Ursula participates in regular DWD forums to learn from other organizations and keep building capability over time. “DWD feels like part of our team,” Jodi says. “They want us to keep getting more out of what we’ve built.”
Building capacity for what comes next
Today, St. Ursula has a finance foundation that supports what the school is trying to do: steward resources wisely, empower people across the organization, and make decisions with clarity.
Next steps include deeper use of dashboards, better enrollment tracking, and additional integrations, such as Paycor, so more information can flow automatically and the team can keep pushing work upstream, away from the manual grind and toward insight.
“We’re planning for the future, for the next generation,” Jodi concludes. “And it’s exciting, because now we have the system and the partner to keep improving.”
Ready to take the next step? DWD is here to help.
From elementary schools to seminaries, Sage Intacct’s powerful suite of tools and features supports educational excellence by simplifying financial processes, enabling better decision-making, and providing actionable insights through advanced tracking of KPIs.
If that sounds like what you need to better manage your finances and boost operational efficiency, why not take the next step?
DWD offers a complimentary Software Needs Assessment to help identify your organization’s needs and match you with the perfect software solution. Our team is here to help guide you, ensuring you get the most out of your investment and further your mission.
About the Author: Cassie Rock
