McCallum Theatre · Performing Arts · Palm Desert, CA
Two years of workarounds. Solved in days.
- Solution
- Data Moose CDP with F9 and Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT
- Refresh
- Every 2 hours or on demand
- IT effort
- One VPN connection, no internal build
Background
A finance team that had already built what it needed.
The McCallum has been the premier performing arts center in the Coachella Valley for over three decades, with education programs reaching more than a million students since 1997.
Robert McConaughey, interim President and CFO, runs financial operations on Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT. For years he used F9, an Excel-based reporting tool pulling live from Financial Edge NXT, to produce the customized statements his board required.
Then Blackbaud stopped hosting third-party products. With little advance notice the live connection was severed.
Why Not Build It Internally
He ruled it out quickly.
Pulling data through Blackbaud's SKY API means knowing every relevant data point, managing rate limits, handling record deletions, and keeping pace as the API expands.
Hiring for a one-off build is neither cost-effective nor sustainable for a lean finance team. Migrating accounting systems meant months of implementation, retraining, and abandoning workflows he had spent years building.
The Challenge
A statement no standard report can produce.
The McCallum produces a customized statement that is neither standard accrual nor pure cash basis. The board needs to see cash actually received on pledges, not only recognized revenue. As Robert put it, a $50,000 pledge cannot pay the light bill. F9 was the only tool that could pull balance sheet cash accounts onto an income statement, something standard Blackbaud reporting cannot do.
Hosting ended.
Carefully built Excel reports lost their live connection.
Backups lagged by days.
Statements were never fully current.
Board reporting on someone else's schedule.
When the chair called for current financials, the answer was wait until Monday.
Eighteen months with another vendor.
Ended in a full refund, with no workable fix.
The Solution
Reconnect the tool he already trusted.
Data Moose stood up a governed SQL warehouse fed from Financial Edge NXT on a two-hour refresh, reachable over an SSL VPN. F9 points at the warehouse instead of the hosted connection that went away.
Nothing in the reporting stack changed. The same workbooks, the same formulas, the same statement formats, running on data that is current again.
Outcomes
What changed.
- Live reporting restored after two years, on a two-hour refresh
- Board reporting on his schedule. He can close statements on a weekend and have reconciled numbers within two hours
- Full confidence in the numbers. His cash-basis statements reconcile against standard accrual reports every month
- No new tools, no migration, no retraining. Kept F9, kept Excel, kept the formats. The only thing that changed was that the data became live again
- Minimal IT involvement. One VPN connection, no internal build, no ongoing maintenance
It's been a game changer for me and my ability to produce financial statements.
I would have wished that you guys had been here sooner.
Why This Matters
Most finance teams do not want a new reporting tool. They want the one they already know to keep working against current data.
Data Moose reads from the source systems and leaves them alone. Any tool that connects to SQL Server keeps working, which is why this took days rather than a migration cycle.