CASE STUDY

Brookline Center for Community Health Builds a Single Source of Financial Truth with NetSuite & Caravel

August 21, 2026

Brookline Center for Community Health has spent 60 years delivering outpatient psychiatry, school-based mental health services, and community mediation programs across the Greater Boston area. As the nonprofit grew by $10 million, its finance team was still closing the books on Sage 100, with as much as 95 percent of agency finances tracked in Excel and school-based invoicing running through QuickBooks.  

When a technology grant made a new ERP possible, Chief Operating Officer Kelly Madden led a four-person finance team through a nine-and-a-half-month implementation of NetSuite with Caravel, hitting a hard grant spend-down deadline while replacing a patchwork of spreadsheets and disconnected systems with one connected financial platform. 

Challenge 

  • Limited transparency for the board: Version-controlled Excel workbooks made it difficult to audit who had touched agency finances, and mistakes were hard to catch before they reached leadership. 
  • A legacy system that couldn’t keep pace: Sage 100, paired with Excel and QuickBooks, could not support a nonprofit that had grown $10 million or the restricted and unrestricted revenue reporting required by its federal school contracts. 
  • A fixed, grant-funded timeline: Madden had nine and a half months to implement before the technology grant’s spend-down deadline, with go-live landing on July 1, the start of the organization’s year-end fiscal close. 
  • A lean internal team: Only four colleagues, Madden, the CFO, the finance director, and one accountant, carried the implementation alongside their day-to-day finance responsibilities. 

“I was on a grant spend down. I had nine and a half months to implement, and I really needed a vendor partner that understood dollars and how things needed to get spend down within certain times,” said Kelly Madden, Chief Operating Officer at Brookline Center for Community Health. 

Solution 

Madden ran a formal RFP process, evaluating Sage Intacct and NetSuite before choosing NetSuite for its combined general ledger and planning and budgeting capabilities. NetSuite itself pointed Brookline Center to Caravel, but Madden still interviewed multiple implementation partners before selecting Caravel based on team qualifications and the ability to meet her grant timeline. 

The Caravel team paired a senior and a junior implementation consultant with Brookline Center’s finance staff. The first month centered on translating between Brookline Center’s old accounting language and NetSuite’s terminology, a gap Madden hadn’t anticipated. Once the team shifted from dictating existing processes to describing desired outcomes and letting Caravel map them to the system, progress accelerated. 

Midway through the NetSuite Planning and Budgeting (NSPB) buildout, Madden flagged that a Caravel resource wasn’t the right fit for the work. Caravel’s project manager reviewed the session recordings, paused that portion of the project, and reassigned a new consultant, keeping the broader implementation on schedule. 

To meet budget, Brookline Center migrated one year of journal-entry-level data into NetSuite rather than full transaction-level detail, then retired its Sage server once the prior year’s audit was complete. 

“I wasn’t going to hit it in a week and a half, but if I don’t get this spend down done, then it’s off the back of next year’s revenue,” Madden said. Caravel adjusted its billing schedule so Brookline Center could still meet the grant’s spend-down deadline. 

Outcome 

  • One system of record: Invoicing now links directly to the general ledger, approvals happen inside NetSuite, and Madden’s team fields far fewer emails about payment status. 
  • Real-time ratios for the board: NSPB syncs with the general ledger every night, giving Madden continuously updated financial ratios and a dashboard she can share with the board and funders on demand. 
  • Simplified, scheduled reporting: After building out more workflows than the team needed at launch, Madden simplified them post-go-live and now schedules recurring reports so leaders can track grant spend-down and revenue without chasing finance. 
  • Ongoing platform support: Brookline Center added 10 hours a month of advanced customer support after go-live, helping the team build confidence in the system during its first year live. 

Looking ahead, Brookline Center is integrating ACH payments directly with its bank, refining restricted versus unrestricted revenue tracking, adding time tracking for federal grant and contract spend-down, and connecting Outlook data into NetSuite to support contract reporting. 

“There’s no one in my organization that isn’t happy that we did it,” Madden said. “It made our life easier.” 

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