Public health NGO uses Sage Intacct's dimensional and multi-currency capabilities to manage financial operations across 11 countries with a lean global finance structure.
Evidence Action runs roughly $50 million in annual expenses across about 900 employees, with a deliberately lean and globally-layered finance structure: bookkeepers and accountants in each country, rolling up to regional leadership, matrixed into a small central global team responsible for consolidation, reporting, and infrastructure.
"We have a small and globally-layered finance team," says Jim Schroder, Global Controller at Evidence Action. But the simplicity of that structure sits on top of real complexity. Evidence Action manages 10 entities inside Sage Intacct using nine different base currencies, while handling transactions, reporting structures, and funding requirements across multiple countries, programs, and funders at once. Reporting demands vary by donor, geography, and program—a donor backing a single program might need consolidated reporting across four or five countries simultaneously, while a country leadership team needs every program running within its borders.
For a finance platform, that's a structural test. Previous systems forced reporting structures to be layered manually through nested logic—departments containing funders containing programs, like a set of dolls. Evidence Action needed a system that could treat each reporting dimension independently.
"You outgrow a financial system that doesn't allow you to interact with each of those dimensions independently," Jim says."
The other capability Evidence Action depends on daily is multi-currency. Operating across 11 countries with nine base currencies, the organization regularly moves money in ways a single-currency system simply couldn't capture.
A transaction can be entered in any currency and translated immediately into the functional currency of the entity it belongs to. That flexibility matters because the money rarely stays in one place: the US office might pay a vendor in Australia, in Australian dollars, for work that ultimately benefits a program in Uganda.
"We've got to somehow capture that whole flow of things—both correctly financially, but also then for reporting in the end," Jim says. For an organization whose funding and spending cross borders constantly, being able to handle that natively rather than through manual conversion is, as Jim puts it, another piece that's "kind of impossible to imagine not having."
Although Evidence Action has used Sage Intacct since 2018, parts of the finance operation were still running on heavily manual processes that were best practice at implementation, but had been overtaken since. Over the past six months, the organization implemented dynamic allocations to automate quarterly allocation workflows previously handled by hand across multiple countries.
The first time the team ran a full quarter through the module, the result was stark.
"What used to take six people about two days to process took two people about 20 minutes," Jim says. "And most of that was just waiting while the computer ran it in the background."
For the team, that's not an incremental gain. It's a structural shift in how much of the finance team's time is freed for higher-value work—and AI-assisted workflows are accelerating the same shift. The team now uses AI to handle reconciliations that once meant hours of manual searching.
A recent example: a fundraiser preparing a donor report found that the prior year's spending figure had grown by $20,000 since it was last reported, due to a handful of transactions miscoded against a funder during year-end close, buried deep in consolidated books with little detail to go on. Finding them by hand would have meant hours of sifting. Instead, the finance team fed the relevant data sets into an AI tool, which identified the specific transactions accounting for the discrepancy in moments.
"Staff are no longer spending 80% of their time at the transaction level," Jim says. "They're spending their time at the analysis and process level."
For a globally distributed nonprofit, that reallocation of finance capacity is more than efficiency. It's a sustainability argument.
"Having the chance to grow while keeping headcount fairly stable is the pathway that we need to an appropriate overhead future as a nonprofit," Jim says.
What makes Evidence Action's use of Sage Intacct distinctive isn't only operational efficiency. It's that the finance structure is designed to keep the team connected to program impact at the level of individual transactions.
Because every entry touches the funder dimension and the project dimension, the people doing the accounting always know what the money is for. Entering a bill, processing an invoice in Malawi—each carries the context of which program it supports and what outcome it serves. Accounting and mission don't operate in separate registers.
"The fact that everything we code touches our funder dimension and touches our projects helps every single transaction stay connected to the work," Jim says.
For Jim, that connection is the point—not a byproduct of good system design but the thing that makes the work meaningful for a finance team operating under constant pressure to stay lean.
