Success Stories

Santa Cruz County Department of Public Health

Santa Cruz County Department of Public Health custom Agreement Lifecycle Management and Budget Tracking solution.

Meet The Client

About Santa Cruz County Department of Public Health

The Santa Cruz County Department of Public Health focuses on protecting and improving the health of communities through education, promotion of healthy lifestyles, disease and injury prevention, and the promotion of sound health policy. The division is comprised of a highly diverse work force that encompasses many professional disciplines and several main areas of focus.

santa cruz county public health

The Challenge

Every year, Santa Cruz Department of Public Health manages hundreds of revenue agreements and expenditure agreements. These contracts have complex funding streams, and their accounting system did not have the mechanisms to track expenses to grant budgets. Spending reports were always in arrears, and there was no easy way to forecast burn rates to effectively spend down a budget. Additionally, the administrative overhead of managing hundreds of agreements throughout their respective lifecycle was cumbersome. Data about these grants and vendor agreements was spread across tens of thousands of spreadsheets, documents, emails, internal forms, and approval processes.

The Solution

Summit partnered with Santa Cruz Department of Public Health to tailor an Agreement Lifecycle Management and Budget Tracking solution built on the Salesforce CRM. This solution integrates the siloed data that lives in their personnel database, job classification database, time tracking system, email system, and accounting system. Additionally, it phased out several spreadsheets the agency used for budgeting and expense-tracking purposes.

  • Employee Information: The personnel database is periodically synced, which brings in job classification codes, pay rates, and more.

  • Organization Hierarchy: The Divisions, Branches, Units, Programs, and Subprograms are tracked and related to employees with their roles.

  • Organizations and Contacts: All Funders, Vendors, and Community Partners are in the system.  When a new vendor is created, it finds a matching vendor from the accounting system to eliminate accidental duplicates.

  • Outlook Integration: Selected emails from Outlook are synchronized to their respective Contact, Organization, and Agreement record.

  • Revenue & Expenditure Agreements: All agreements are tracked and connected together to see a clear flow of money between revenue agreements and expenditure agreements.

  • Agreement Contact Roles: Employees and Funder/Vendor Contacts are related to agreements with predefined roles.

  • Deliverables: Grant deadlines for spend reports, progress reports, and other deliverables are scheduled and assigned to the appropriate person with proactive notification of due dates.

  • Budgets: Grant budgets can be designed in accordance with the funder-provided spend plan, which supports Budget Categories, Budget Line Items, and tracking forecasts and actuals to Budget Periods.

  • Expense Import: Payroll and Non-Payroll Expenses are imported weekly into the system and automatically associated with vendors, employees, agreements, and various accounting codes.

  • Expense Allocation: Expenses automatically flow to the budget based on the assigned accounting codes, which can be easily allocated to budget line items.

  • Document Generation: Using Conga Composer, we merge in data from the Agreement records to pre-populate forms and create Word and Excel documents.

  • Approval Processes: Approval Processes have been built for the forms, which use rules-based assignments to automatically select the people who need to sign, view, or receive a copy of a document using the Agreement Contact Roles or Division Contacts.

  • DocuSign: Approval Processes automatically spin up a DocuSign envelope with all attachments, assignees, roles, signing order, and more.

  • Analytics: Numerous bespoke reports and dashboards were built to track the metrics that matter.

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Results for Our Client

As a result of this implementation, Santa Cruz Department of Public Health’s Grant Managers can administer nearly every aspect of their agreements through Salesforce. The Support Staff are making fewer errors because of the wizard-based tools and process automation. Accountants are collaborating with Grant Managers in a budgeting system that accurately allocates costs. Vendors can get their claims approved quicker because the process is streamlined, and Agency Leadership is able to make timely and informed decisions.

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The skill set and knowledge that Summit has brought to this project far surpasses our initial expectation- especially since our initial contact with Salesforce corp. was challenged in regards to utilizing training videos to suit our scope and need. Summit and team has been helpful in supporting our team with a custom solution in order for us to be able to serve our community better. They are timely and professional, and eager to learn about the why before telling us the what.

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