Executive Summary

Our client is an impact investor working in the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program. They help create jobs by pairing government funding with small businesses that need capital to expand their operations and offer quality goods and services.

Their expertise within the NMTC program makes helping their customers simple, however they experienced challenges with their legacy workflows. The NMTC program has years long reporting requirements, strict documentation parameters and commands attention to detail. Their current state was one of spreadsheets, PDFs, emails, and siloed data files in Sharepoint.

The Apricity Group streamlined business processes with unified workflows, file storage and task management on the Salesforce platform. The outcome is increased visibility into client projects, upcoming due dates for critical compliance reporting, and foresight into future capital allocation that aligns with the rigorous reporting requirements of NMTC.

What is a digital workflow?

A digital workflow is a sequence of steps managed through digital means to accomplish a specific business process or task. This involves the use of software and digital tools to automate, track, and manage the flow of work from inception through to completion. Key components include:

Task Assignment: Automatically assigning tasks to team members.
Document Management: Storing, sharing, and managing documents electronically.
Approval Processes: Streamlining the process for approvals with notifications and electronic signatures.
Integration with Systems: Connecting CRM, ERP and other business systems to facilitate data flow.

Digital workflows are crucial in today's business landscape where speed, accuracy, and data-driven insights are key competitive advantages. They support businesses in being agile, reducing operational costs, and improving both internal processes and external customer interactions.

Background on the CDFI Fund and NMTC Industry

The New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) stimulates business and real estate investment in low-income communities in the United States via federal tax credits. The CDFI Fund, which is part of the US Treasury, allocates tax credits to Community Development Entities which is then distributed to Qualified Active Low Income Community Businesses (QALICB) via impact investors and other stakeholders.

Being impact investors, our clients are experts in the exhaustive and complex processes required to take part in the NMTC programs. While impact investing is a rapidly growing industry, the available tools are not up to the digital standards of other well established sectors. It’s an industry that must comply with intricate reporting requirements that demands broad access to digital tools readily available in other more common fields.

Most often digital tools include spreadsheets, PDFs, sticky notes, Sharepoint and…someone’s inbox. Data is siloed preventing leadership from gaining a holistic view of the organization. Decisions are made on instinct and scaling requires increasing headcount which fails to solve inefficiencies inherent to an analog world.

Why Go Digital?

Digitizing workflows and integrating disparate systems into a cohesive digital environment is critical for modern businesses seeking to enhance operational efficiency and strategic decision-making. By automating routine tasks, businesses can significantly reduce errors, accelerate processes, and free up staff to focus on higher-value activities.

As organizations grow, this digital foundation enables scalability without the proportional complexity in managing operations. Also, compliance with regulatory standards becomes more manageable with automated tracking and reporting capabilities. These factors make the digitization of workflows and system integration not just a strategic advantage but a necessity for businesses aiming to thrive in a competitive, data-driven landscape.

Importance in Modern Business Environments

Increased Efficiency:

Automation minimizes manual effort, reducing human error and speeding up tasks.

Enhanced Collaboration:

Digital workflows provide a platform where team members can work together regardless of their physical location, improving communication and coordination.

Data Integrity and Compliance:

By digitizing processes, businesses can ensure data integrity, with fewer opportunities for data mishandling. Compliance with industry regulations is also easier to manage and audit through digital means.

Scalability:

As organizations grow, digital workflows can scale to accommodate increased workloads and complex processes without increasing headcount.

Better Decision Making:

Digitized data allows businesses to leverage analytics for better insights into their operations, customer behavior, or process bottlenecks, leading to data-driven decision-making.

Improved Customer Experience:

Quicker response times, fewer errors, and the ability to provide real-time updates or status checks enhance customer satisfaction.

Transparency and Accountability:

Digital workflows often come with logs and audit trails, making it clear who did what and when, which promotes accountability and simplifies performance tracking.

Salesforce Implementation for the NMTC Industry

The business goal for this project was to digitize the workflow for our impact investor clients. Our team summarized the goal into three main components:

Provide at a glance compliance reporting for Tax Allocation Round compliance metrics.
Centralize task management for project compliance.
Create a dashboard for use in investor meetings to help prioritize future investments within the NMTC program.

We started by mapping out the complex data model needed to track all the necessary financial transactions. Accounting for each Tax Allocation Round, Qualified Equity Investment, Investor, and Qualified Active Low-Income Community Business (QALICB) was critical so our clients can report on this data for compliance and to support internal operations.

Once finalized, the data model delivered the KPIs needed to measure against program mandated metrics. With a few clicks the data model provided reports and dashboards to help our impact investor clients track their QALICB projects against the Tax Round Allocation metrics.

Next we addressed decentralized task management. The organization had no centralized task management strategy, so there were “to do’s” in email, spreadsheets and sticky notes. The NMTC program requires a lot of financial reports from eligible projects to be distributed to various investors, government entities and stakeholders for those projects to remain compliant with the NMTC terms.

We worked with our impact investor clients to identify the most frequent recurring financial reports associated with QALICB projects. We then tailored Salesforce tasks to meet NMTC use cases. Centralizing task management to Salesforce delivered greater transparency, accountability and efficiency. Our client now has visibility into future commitments for financial reports and other deliverables related to ongoing QALICB projects.

After creating a task management data model to reflect the complexities of the NMTC program, our final goal was to create dashboards enabling leadership to ensure organization-wide project compliance and alignment with complex Tax Allocation Round metrics.

We worked with our client to identify two dashboard use cases. The first use case was a set of dashboards and reports that would show where all the investment dollars from each Tax Allocation Round were invested. This would help senior leadership ensure that the NMTC program requirements were being followed, and highlight funds that still needed to be allocated to qualifying projects. This dashboard replaced several spreadsheets and gave the executive team a single source of truth for operational meetings. Ultimately this dashboard is the north star for guiding investment decisions.

The second use case for dashboards was to track compliance with the Tax Allocation Round metrics. Each Allocation Round issued from the NMTC comes with specific reporting requirements. Those requirements ensure that investments into QALICBs create jobs in the demographic targeted by the NMTC.

We designed one dashboard to provide an at-a-glance view of our client’s compliance with the different Tax Allocation Rounds. This required setting metrics at the individual Allocation Round level, and displaying attainment vs goal for each metric and each Allocation Round. Reporting on these metrics would not be possible without our data model design implemented in Salesforce.

Conclusion

The Apricity Group was able to build a unified digital workflow within Salesforce for impact investors working with the NMTC program. This provided increased efficiency by reducing disparate systems, manual data entry, and data management. Our solution delivers real-time information and coordination across departments, enabling scalable growth through systems, not headcount.

From Fragmentation to Integration: The Advantages of a Unified Digital Workflow with Salesforce