About The Community Food Bank Of Eastern Oklahoma
The Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma provides millions of pounds of food each year through non-profit partners and agencies to people in need throughout 24 counties in eastern Oklahoma. Through corporate and retail store donations, community support, food drives and US government commodities, the organization maintains this level of support. They also purchase non-perishable goods and produce to ensure the recipients they aid are receiving proper nutrition.
David Parrack is the CFO and has one Staff Accountant on his team. The two of them manage all the finances so it was even more crucial that they use technology to maximize their efficiencies where possible. Previous to MineralTree, the Staff Accountant was managing accounts payable and accounts receivables. She was manually entering bills into the ERP and following up on lost bills and managing incoming vendor calls. Approvals were done manually on printed copies of invoices. With MineralTree, all of the manual processing has been removed from the Staff Accountant. Now David can quickly review invoices in the system, route for approvals and schedule the payments.
Community Food Bank Of Eastern Oklahoma To Break Ground On Facility Expansion
Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma To Break Ground On Facility ExpansionTULSA, Oklahoma –
The Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma is officially breaking ground Friday on an expansion to their current building. Leaders with the Community Food Bank say the ceremony is at 11 a.m. They say that when all is finished, the new building will make room for new opportunities to serve the community and help people in need.
The $28 million Build Hope Capital Expansion Project will be an expansion to the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahomas current building near Pine and Peoria in Tulsa.
When completed, the facility will include a culinary center, volunteer center, warehouse and partner agency access.
Leaders say one in seven people are facing hunger in the Tulsa area and every year they distribute more than 27 million meals to people in need. They say they believe this expansion will double the amount of food available for distribution to their partnering food pantries across Eastern Oklahoma.
They say they have been in service to those in need in the Tulsa community for 40 years and they are looking forward to another 40 in the new and updated facility.
Community Food Bank Of Oklahoma
New Haven Volunteers!
Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma
The mission of the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma is to feed the hungry of Eastern Oklahoma through a network of Partner Programs and engage communities in ending hunger. Their vision is food security, with dignity, for all eastern Oklahomans.
The Food Bank is the largest private hunger relief organization in eastern Oklahoma. They provide food and other donated goods to 450 Partner Programs in 24 counties of eastern Oklahoma. These programs include emergency food pantries, soup kitchens, emergency shelters, after-school programs and senior citizen centers. They provide more than 346,000 meals each week to people struggling with hunger. During fiscal year 2015, the Food Bank distributed more than 21.5 million pounds of food.
Periodically, New Haven organizes groups that go to the Food Bank to help sort and repackage various kinds of food.
For more information about the Food Bank, please go their website at www.okfoodbank.org. If you would like to participate in a future New Haven group activity benefitting the Food Bank, please contact Dee Kemp at 918-839-0713 or at .
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What We Aim To Solve
While Oklahoma usually falls in the top five states for the number of hungry people, due to theCOVID-19 pandemic, our area is experiencing a sharp increase in the number of people who are needing our help for the first time. Feeding Americas 2018 Map the Meal Gap study was released in May, 2020. The organization released a companion study and interactive map that illustrate the projected impact of the pandemic on local food insecurity in 2020. This study predicts the food insecurity rate in our service area will rise to 22% as a result of the pandemic, a 7% increase over the pre-COVID-19 food insecurity rate of 15% in our service area. Now more than ever, healthy food is crucial to our low-income families livelihood.
The Solution: Mineraltree Automates The Entire Process And Ensures The Complete End
There were a number of reasons the organization wanted to implement MineralTree to automate accounts payable. There was an intense reliance on resources to manually process invoices, make payments and capture approvals. Invoices were sometimes lost since there was no systemic workflow being adhered to which also resulted in the organization being at risk of understating payables at any point in time.
Evaluating four accounts payable automation solutions, they decided on MineralTree for the true out-of-thebox integration with Intacct. They also knew that once they made their decision, they needed a quick implementation and MineralTree was able to deliver. Adding the ability to make vendor payments by check, ACH, credit card or virtual card sealed the deal.
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The Bottom Line: Why Choose Mineraltree Invoice
MineralTree delivers an end-to-end accounts payable automation solution fully integrated with Intacct. Multi-tiered approval workflows automatically triggered based on pre-defined workflows makes invoice and payment approvals easy to manage and capture. As volume grows, MineralTree together with Intacct will allow the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma finance team to manage everyday tasks while focusing on value add activities.
Accounts payable management is extremely easy now that we have MineralTree. Manual invoice entry is gone and we no longer have to chase approvers down in order to get payments out on time, David Parrack, CFO, Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma.
A Special Thank You To Brenda Ewart
Some 26 years ago, as her youngest of three children headed into Grade 1, Richmond Hills Brenda Ewart took a part-time job as manager of the Richmond Hill Community Food Bank.
Our family attended Richmond Hill United Church where the food bank was located at the time, and the minister suggested I apply for the job, explained Ewart, stating one attraction was she could be home before her children returned from school.
But what started as a job, has become a passion and has consumed far more hours each week than originally forecast, and has pulled in her husband, Bob, as well. Although she has been paid, both have donated many volunteer hours over the years to what has become a labour of love for both.
Bob had his eyes opened and so did the kids to the need for the food bank, explained Ewart. And the volunteers have become my friends, my family. Some have volunteered longer than Ive been here! Read more.
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The Benefits: Payment Automation Paperless Process Approval Management
As the CFO of a lean team, I needed to ensure my time was not being spent on manual tasks while empowering my team to focus on value-added activities, David Parrack, CFO, Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma. With MineralTree, we can now easily manage accounts payable by auto-routing approvals, scheduling payments ahead of time and supporting our mission to go paperless. And its all synced with our Intacct ERP.
The timesaving The Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma experienced by automating their accounts payable workflow was what they needed to support the reallocation of resources to accounts receivable activities . Removing the need to chase approvals, manage paper invoices and manually search for payment status for vendor inquiries was exactly what they needed.
The Challenge: Reduce Manual Processes To Improve Accuracies And Reallocate Resources To Value
When it came to their ERP, Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma had recently migrated from QuickBooks to Intacct for the added functionality they required. They also wanted a cloud-based solution designed for multiple users and delivering dashboarding capabilities that they really needed to gain better visibility into financial data.
Choosing Intacct gave them the functionality they needed from an ERP but it still did not solve all of their accounts payable challenges as it did not seamlessly provide the routing, approval, and centralized payment options that they were seeking.
Armed with an ERP to meet the needs of the business, they now needed to focus on a solution that would reduce the manual processes that were consuming resources. One area that they recognized could be impacted was accounts payable. With the intent to move towards paperless AP, streamline approval processes and have visibility into true cash flow, they sought a solution.
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State Cooperative Extension Web Sites
The Cooperative Extension sites have a wealth of information for any backyard gardener. Once you go to the site look for a link for homes and gardens, landscape, consumer horticulture, etc. to find information on improving your backyard garden. Neighboring state sites may offer information your own states site lacks.
How We Work
The Richmond Hill Community Food Bank is a non-government, independently run non-profit agency, founded to provide temporary emergency food assistance to those in need. Our strength is the generous support of the people of Richmond Hill, Thornhill and Maple, corporate supporters, food drives by churches and schools, and our staff of amazing volunteers. The food bank has a strong history in the community and became a charitable organization in 1991. It is overseen by a volunteer board of directors and has one paid, part-time manager, Lee Reynolds.
When in season, we receive fresh produce through a variety of sources: farmers markets, Seeds For Change , local gardeners and through Feed Ontario and From Earth to Table.
Financial contributions are used by the Richmond Hill Community Food Bank to provide the best services and deliver help to the people we assist.
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