The Foundation in Support of Local Democracy (FSLD) was founded in September 1989 and is currently the biggest non-governmental organization supporting local authorities in Poland.
FRDL mission is to promote the idea of civic self-governance understood as the basic form of democracy.

The Foundation in Support of Local Democracy scope of activity includes four areas:

• Developing local authorities and local government bodies,
• Developing civil society,
• Local socio-economic development,
• Developing democracy in countries undergoing systemic transformation.

The foundation carries out its activities via a network of sixteen regional centers and their branches and via the Headquarters in Warsaw as well as four public administration schools of higher education founded by FSLD and closely cooperating with it.

The addresses of FSLD activities are local authorities, non-governmental organizations, entrepreneurs and local communities.

FSLD offers training and consultancy, specialist programs concerning all fields of importance to local authorities in the area of civic activism in Poland and abroad - in countries undergoing systemic transformation. The foundation conducts research, takes part in public debates, organizes sector-specific forums for administration and local authorities employees.

FSLD activity is publicly funded from domestic and international sources, which includes pre-accession and structural European Union funds as well as the funds of private organizations.

The main form of FSLD activity are trainings. Consulting services are the second important form of the Foundation's activity. By means of training and various initiatives, FSLD stimulates the constant qualification raising and knowledge broadening process of the representatives of government and local authorities, entrepreneurs and representatives of civic communities. Moreover, the Foundation provides factual support in planning and making strategic decisions. The consultancy offered by FSLD is addressed to Small and Medium Enterprises as well.
 

Integration recommended

The foundation has been working on various systems for many years. Each branch used to act individually and at the end of a month send appropriate reports and settlements to the headquarters, where all data was gathered and summed up mostly manually. With time, the number of branches as well as the amount of data grew.

Before the implementation, the situation looked as follows:

• 16 local centers of the Foundations utilized 11 different financial and bookkeeping systems,
• Various charts of accounts were used,
• Reporting capabilities differed between the systems,
• Different reports were prepared at the local level,
• Delays occurred in preparing and transferring management information,
• The information flow was hindered,
• Reacting to requirements and introducing necessary changes was difficult (example: for example applying new laws),
• The lack of economies of scale,
• Predominant systems: Symfonia, CDN OPT!MA, Raks,
• FSLD did not have a nationwide network structure with a dedicate server for transactional and business applications.

The need for uniformity

Key benefits include:

• Unifying the scope and methods of preparing and distributing business information within the whole Foundation,
• Introducing uniform system for recording financial data and other data regarding the Foundation's activity,
• Thorough unification (to the level of analytical accounts) of the charts of accounts.

"As the Chief Accountant at FSLD I believe that implementing SAP Business One in the Foundation has brought numerous benefits. The first and most important advantage for me was the capability of drawing up financial statements in due dates, because the data in the system is always up-to-date. It is very important for in a multi-department company. Secondly, I am able to control validity and promptness of book entries in the system on a current basis. Thirdly, implementing one financial-bookkeeping system brought about the introduction of a unified corporate chart of accounts. Moreover, at any time I can present the Board with full and up-to-date information. Furthermore, numerous facilities included in SAP Business One resulted in saving time." – Barbara Michalik, Chief Accountant in the Foundation in Support of Local Democracy.

It was worth it

The Foundation’s scale of activity required introducing uniform document templates and the manner of registering economic events.

Implementing SAP Business One allowed all organizational units to use uniform reports. The reports regard both financial settlements as well as the settlement of external (subsidized  by European Union) and internal projects.

The chart of accounts has been unified. Currently employed standard is binding in all FSLD centers in Poland and takes each center's character into considerations. Such a solution allowed to effectively manage information flow and introduce document flow which ensures access to data required by all centers.

SAP Business One significantly simplifies accountants’ work, because all calculations take place in one system without the necessity to manually enter the same data multiple times.

The choice of SAP’s solution dedicated to small and medium enterprises turned out to be a beneficial solution for the non-governmental organization. High flexibility and competency of the SUPREMIS implementation company employees allowed to run the system in 4 months. The implementation was carried out swiftly and in a great atmosphere. Additionally, SUPREMIS implementation company guarantees quick reacting to changing regulations on request of the Foundation in Support of Local Democracy.