A handful of funds on a manual upload schedule is a manageable risk. At $30M across more than 30 funds, that same manual step is the kind of thing that eventually shows up in an audit, a board report, or a donor’s inbox.
Who
The University of North Carolina Asheville (UNC Asheville) manages more than $30M across more than 30 funds, money tied directly to scholarships, academic programs, and the students and faculty who depend on them. As that portfolio grew, so did the time the finance team spent on data entry and reconciliations to the investment manager statements.
The Challenge
UNC Asheville’s existing processes were solid, but many steps still required manual validation outside the system in Excel spreadsheets, especially around investment activity reconciliation and reporting. Every one of those manual steps was a place where a small error could work its way into a fund report, a board update, or a donor conversation. With financial operations and reporting riding on these workflows, the team needed a way to keep pace with a growing portfolio without losing accuracy and control.
Why EverTrue
UNC Asheville has worked with Balance by EverTrue for more than six years, and their use of the platform has grown alongside their fund complexity. The team adopted Balance Automated Imports to pull transaction data directly from their general ledger system into Balance every day, eliminating the need for manual uploads and creating timely and reliable data.
The shift changed what the finance team could count on. The team now works from figures that update themselves, correctly, every day, with cleaner access controls and a more intuitive day-to-day experience for administrators and fund users along the way. Implementation brought together UNC Asheville’s finance team, IT team, and EverTrue, so the change strengthened existing workflows instead of disrupting them.
That matters for a team whose work doesn’t stop at reconciliation. The same data that satisfies an auditor is what the development team pulls from when they’re building donor-facing reports, and the cleaner that data is at the source, the more confidently it travels downstream.
The Results
Since implementing Balance Automated Imports, UNC Asheville has maintained consistent, automated daily data imports and reduced manual reconciliation across its funds, with far fewer places where a small error could work its way into a report.
The real return isn’t a number on a dashboard. It’s a finance team that no longer has to ask whether the numbers are current, because they update themselves every day instead of waiting on someone to remember. Across more than $30M and 30+ funds, that reliability compounds: every fund report the team sends out now carries the same daily-updated accuracy, whether it’s a small named scholarship or the largest fund in the endowment.
That’s the difference between data you have to double check and data a board, an auditor, or a donor can take at face value.
“The way the Investment Activity module separates fund-level activity from investment manager activity makes it easier to understand what’s happening across the portfolio and reflects the way we already think about our reconciliation processes.” – Giovanni Figaro, CPA, Foundation Accountant
For UNC Asheville, that’s what accurate endowment data ultimately enables: not just cleaner reconciliations, but the confidence to stand behind every fund report, every board update, and every conversation with a donor who trusted them with a gift.