HOPE Fair Housing Center

HOPE Improves Grants Management and Payroll Efficiency with Journyx

What Journyx did for us:

Journyx makes it easier to track staff time in one place and against different grants.

– Anne Houghtaling, Executive Director of Investigations and Enforcement

Their Story

HOPE Fair Housing Center was founded in 1968 and is the oldest fair housing center in Illinois. The mission of HOPE is to end housing discrimination and segregation because of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, familial status, or any other characteristics protected under state or local laws.HOPE Fair Housing Center receives funding from a variety of sources, including federal government grants, foundation grants, consulting and general fundraising. Under federal law audit requirements, HOPE is required to track staff time to these various grants – which was proving to be much easier said than done. According to Anne Houghtaling, Executive Director of Investigations and Enforcement at HOPE Fair Housing Center, “Activities and time were being tracked in various ways and in disparate locations, such as spreadsheets and paper-based timesheets. It made gathering all of this data inefficient and prone to error.”

Not only was this process incredibly ineffective and time-consuming for the purposes of federal grant requirements, but it made payroll difficult as well. When staff submitted their timesheets every two weeks, the process of adding up time from different cost centers and entering everything into QuickBooks® under different grants/projects/activities was completely manual – not to mention time-consuming and prone to error.

Solution

Anne had used Journyx previously at the National Fair Housing Alliance, and was quick to adopt it at HOPE. Journyx’s time tracking system made it easier to track staff time in one place and against different grants. “There could be separate time information for different grants, different activities and/or for particular cases being investigated,” said Houghtaling. “With the various columns and drop down menus in Journyx, we can run a variety of reports (such as type of activity) regardless of funding source.

“We can also quickly run reports for time and effort on a particular grant for a specific (e.g. quarterly) time period. With the new Federal Supercircular for federal grants, Journyx allows us to create accurate time and effort reports that more than meet the federal requirements.”

Journyx also provided the ideal solution for an easier and more efficient payroll. According to Houghtaling: “Staff also has to submit timesheets every two weeks, concurrent with payroll, so that time is indisputably being maintained on a concurrent basis.”

Journyx has also decreased payroll error by providing better ways to validate timesheet data. “Our finance manager can easily do a matrix time report and also has several ways of cross checking time totals for accuracy. [Journyx] makes entering accurate staff time expense into QuickBooks® very easy.”

Results

Journyx has proven to be an indispensable tool at HOPE Fair Housing Center – reducing what used to take days into just hours. “As a nonprofit, we need to be incredibly efficient and using systems that take a lot of time to administer and time to enter records hinders our effectiveness in achieving our mission,” said Houghtaling. “Journyx is the most efficient system that we have encountered to meet the various needs that we have.”