About Planned Parenthood Federation of America

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is the largest provider of sexual and reproductive healthcare in the United States. It operates as a federated structure—a national office plus 47 affiliates delivering care across the country—and is funded by donors, from $25 gifts to major contributions, across thousands and thousands of transactions.

The Challenges

For a mission-driven organization at this scale, treasury sits close to the mission itself: as CFO Ilana Esterrich puts it, “no money, no mission.” But the treasury operation was running on manual work that made it slow and reactive.

Manual reconciliation across every account

PPFA’s three-person treasury team was reconciling thousands of donor transactions by hand across more than 10 bank accounts. At that volume, manual reconciliation was cumbersome and left little time for anything else.

No easy cash forecasting or analysis

Beyond reconciliation, the team had no straightforward way to run cash flow analysis or forecasting, or to understand where the organization’s assets were earning the best return. “It was really difficult to have a consistent and modern treasury approach to our finances,” Esterrich said—“and for such a large organization as ours, that really put us behind the power curve.”

A skilled team stuck on low-value work

The team was outstanding, but buried in tedious tasks. Esterrich wanted to automate the repetitive parts of running treasury at PPFA’s size and free her people for the value-added analytical work she needed from them.

Why Nilus

PPFA evaluated the market and chose Nilus deliberately. As a US, non-global organization that doesn’t deal in foreign exchange, the team found that larger platforms would have left expensive, unused capability on the table.

“With Nilus, we have the opportunity to use exactly what we need in real time. Very quick implementation, very thorough and supportive implementation team, great support. And when we start to add more capabilities or need new things, we can very, very quickly scale up.”

What stood out was the approach. Instead of “here’s what our product can do,” the conversation started with the problem PPFA was trying to solve—and connecting that problem to a solution they could actually implement, then scale as new needs emerged.

The Solution

Automate the tedious, free the team for strategy

With Nilus handling reconciliation and the low-value transactional work, PPFA’s treasury team got its time back for the strategic planning the CFO needs. The turnaround on analytics changed completely.

“In the old days it was, ‘I’ll have to work on it, we’ll figure out when we can do this.’ Now when I say I need X, we’re on it—we’ll get it to you shortly. The turnaround time for the information I need to effectively run the finance organization is exponentially faster.”

From reactive cost center to proactive profit center

Real-time cash visibility and forecasting let the team get ahead of issues instead of responding to them—spotting where cash might be tight and proactively reaching out to banks before problems occurred. That shift let finance actively manage investments, balance policy across accounts, and generate gains that get reinvested into the mission.

“We can effectively communicate to the board and our senior leadership that finance is actually a profit center… and then invest those gains back into our mission.”

A partner, not an account number

For an organization that has often felt like “just an account number” with larger vendors, the human support mattered as much as the technology.

“Anytime our senior director of treasury reaches out and says, ‘I don’t know how to do this’ or ‘there’s a new request from the boss,’ the Nilus team steps in and delivers what we need just in time. We’ve never felt not important with Nilus.”

Esterrich noted that the implementation was unusually fast—so much so that Nilus was often the one pushing the pace. “It’s the first time we’ve ever been told by a vendor, ‘Hey, we could move faster, we could get this done for you faster.’”

Conclusion

By moving manual treasury work onto Nilus, Planned Parenthood Federation of America turned a stretched, reactive operation into a proactive one—giving a three-person team the tools to do its best work, and giving the CFO confidence that a function critical to the mission is in capable hands.