Case Study: National Democratic Institute (NDI) achieves major time savings and streamlined global project accounting with Deltek Costpoint (Deltek)

Nonprofit organization uses Deltek Costpoint® to manage accounting for more than 50 offices worldwide

The National Democratic Institute (NDI) is a 20-year-old nonprofit headquartered in Washington, DC that supports democratic institutions worldwide, operating with roughly 170 staff at headquarters and 500 across more than 50 field offices and relying on grant funding ($60M in 2004). NDI’s DOS-based Solomon accounting system could not handle project/grant accounting needs, forcing time-consuming manual calculations, duplicate entries, slow month-end closes and difficult travel-advance tracking, which strained a 20-person finance team and lowered morale.

NDI implemented Deltek Costpoint in 1999, deploying modules for general ledger, payroll, labor & leave, travel and project accounting plus reporting tools. The new system provided a single point of entry, automated rate and labor allocations, enabled field-office accounting and custom fields for diverse grants, and cut month-end close from 2–3 days to a few hours and travel-advance processing from two days to 60–90 minutes—saving staff time (avoiding roughly five additional hires), improving reporting and boosting morale and trust in financial data.

National Democratic Institute (NDI)

Sandy Schultz

Director of Finance