SPRUCETOP CASE STUDY
Enterprise tools for managing campaign finance & compliance.
Challenge— Develop a full suite of accounting tools for tracking contributions and expenditures, contributors and vendors, warning if contributors exceed legal contribution limits, ensuring all fields required for reporting compliance are completed, generating compliance reports and tracking filing status. Make it searchable. Make it usable.
Accounting Toolset
An enterprise suite of accounting tools forms the core experience for professional campaign treasurers and their staff — providing detailed management and status tracking of contributions, expenditures and their itemized distrubutions, and fund transfers. Intelligent data entry tools adapt with each selection to ensure staff only needs to see the required fields for the type of contribution of expense being entered, utilizing instant search features to quickly select.
Reporting & Compliance
Robust tools generate state mandated reports, generating for hundreds of clients during daily filing, ensuring every contribution and expenditure of a political campaign or committee is reported as required.
Warning Systems
A series of warning systems ensure that all legally required information is entered and reported, that reports are filed on time and amended with changes, and that campaigns never accept more money from a donor than legally allowed. Alerts are displayed in the interface as data is entered, in report generation pre-checks, and text messages are sent up to four times daily to ensure reports are filed on time.
Information Self-Service
An enterprise suite of accounting tools forms the core experience for professional campaign treasurers and their staff — providing detailed management and status tracking of contributions, expenditures and their itemized distrubutions, and fund transfers.
Campaign Collaboration
Use of multiple algorithms to support cross-validation of weighting. The ability to inspect how weighting affects individual respondents provides an additional layer of validation.
Automation
Reports delivered to client campaigns used to take staff days to compile into the required PDF format for 100 clients. Tools that automate the generation process from data now take only 10 minutes for nearly 400 clients, while also delivering the reports by email to multiple recipients.
Faceted Global Search
Powered by a lightning fast search engine, users are able to instantly search through a range of data types — campaign entities, contributions and contributors, expenditures and vendors, reports, contacts — browsing results in a single filterable interface.
Check Printing
Outgoing expenses from campaigns and committes are printed directly from the web application onto blank checks, including sender name and address, as well as the MICR line for routing and account information.
Excel Import & Export
Excel data import tools provides a powerful way to automate entry of large amounts of contributions or expenses. Excel exports standard throughout the application provide easy access for campaign staff to download up-to-date data.
Scheduled Expenses
Further automating repetitive tasks, the application provides the ability to setup the auto-creation of expenses on a chosen day of the month or frequency of days.
Reconciliation
One of many features that help staff ensure accuracy, the Reconciliation tool provides the ability to select the contributions that have deposited and cleared expenses within a given banking period, reconciling the system balance against the bank statement balance.
Online Donation Processing
The application receives donation notifications for campaigns from standard party-affiliated payment processors like WinRed and ActBlue, automatically creating contribution records in the system and displaying them for staff review. AI provides intelligent matching between the details of incoming contributions and the database of existing contributors, helping to ensure new contributions are accepted from contributors over their maximum limit for donation to a single campaign.
Talking to Financial Data with AI
A copilot to the accounting register for each campaign or committee entity, an AI-enabled tool provides a conversational interface to discuss the full financial history with an intelligent copilot. This can answer questions about the status of an incoming contribution or payment of an invoice, or provide analysis.
Spruce Top built two similar applications for campaign finance management, one tailored for candidate campaigns and one created for strategic management of political action committees. This case study covers features from both applications.