Client Background

Downtown Streets Team (DST) is a nonprofit organization focused on helping individuals experiencing homelessness to reintegrate into society through community-based programs. As
a mission-driven entity funded through a combination of grants and donations, DST must maintain strict financial transparency. Payroll planning — one of their largest and most sensitive budget categories — must not only be accurate but also traceable to specific funding sources.

The Challenge

DST faced persistent issues with planning and allocating their payroll budget. Staff salaries needed to be accurately distributed across various funding streams and departments, each with its own reporting and compliance requirements. On top of that, they had to account for numerous employer obligations — including insurance, pensions, and other benefit contributions — all of which required precise, rules-based calculations.

While Accounting Seed provided a solid financial foundation, DST needed more specialized tools for complex payroll planning and budget allocations. The native cube functionality wasn’t designed for their advanced use case, which involved intricate benefit calculations and fund-source tracking. As a result, building detailed, multi-dimensional reports and automating allocations required additional support — which is where CloudBudget stepped in to complement and extend their existing Accounting Seed environment.

Solution

To solve these challenges, CloudBudget implemented an integrated solution combining an enhanced Payroll Module with a powerful Allocations Engine:

The Payroll Module was tailored to DST’s structure and needs:

• Flexible planning of salaries and automatically calculates all related benefit deductions
• Detailed budget lines that include breakdowns by employee, salary type, and employer-paid contributions.
• Templates and non-financial coefficient libraries to simplify setup and maintenance, making the system both scalable and adaptable

The Allocations Module works seamlessly with payroll data:

• Budget lines are automatically distributed across funding sources and departments based on allocation rules configured directly in the payroll interface
• Automation removed the need for manual mapping or external tracking spreadsheets

Integrated reporting tools give DST the power to:

• Analyze payroll data from multiple perspectives — by grant, by department, by individual employee, etc.
• Produce clear, customizable reports that meet both internal decision-making and external compliance requirements

Results

The solution delivered by CloudBudget has significantly improved DST’s budgeting and reporting processes:

• Full automation of payroll planning and allocation dramatically reduced manual work and errors
• Improved transparency and compliance, with every salary dollar now traceable to its corresponding funding source
• Scalable configuration thanks to templates and coefficient libraries, allowing quick adjustments to staffing changes or new grant structures
• Robust, flexible reporting that empowers the finance team with insights across any dimension — from individual employees to full programmatic summaries
• Elimination of Accounting Seed limitations — no more reliance on rigid, formula-less cubes or inflexible data structures

CloudBudget helped DST go from manual, error-prone payroll planning to a fully integrated, automated, and audit-ready budgeting process — giving them the tools to focus more on their mission and less on their spreadsheets.