Village for Vets(opens in a new tab) Director of Operations and Compliance Dr. Regina Lopez assists with supportive services for unhoused and at-risk veterans through federal grants. Within the first days of being on the job, she identified significant issues with monitoring efficiency. At the time, the majority of the company’s requests and approvals were processed manually through emails, spreadsheets, and Adobe Acrobat. These time-consuming, manual processes introduced errors and kept her team from doing what they do best: helping veterans. With grant compliance and community trust on the line, Dr. Lopez knew Village for Vets needed a way to manage compliance at scale — ensuring every step was auditable, secure, and policy-driven by default.

From missed emails to mission risk: The need for a better system

Prior to Dr. Lopez’s arrival, Village for Vets relied on spreadsheets, Adobe-based PDFs, and email chains to send and sign temporary financial assistance requests. At the time, case managers would send a request by email to a supervisor, and the supervisor would sign and send it to the program manager. The program manager would then sign and send the request to accounting for processing.

In one case, an approver missed a request due to the volume of emails in their inbox. This omission cost the organization in many ways, and according to Dr. Lopez, “Not only did we have to pay a good amount in late fees, but the participant was at risk of losing their apartment.” To prevent these gaps, the organization needed a platform that uses intelligent logic to route approvals and ensure that policy-critical tasks never fall through the cracks of a busy inbox.

Establishing and maintaining trust is a key factor in the work Village for Vets does, and Dr. Lopez stated that “If we don’t have that trust and we don’t have that reputation in the community, it makes it really hard for us to be able to do our job. And it makes it even more difficult for us to‌ help that participant to obtain or maintain housing.” This instance served as a catalyst for change for Village for Vets, demonstrating the necessity of finding a functional system to aid the company in its efforts to combat homelessness.

Village for Vets’ use case was more than just automating its financial assistance request processes. What the company does impacts the entire community and its people, and finding a more efficient way to carry out its mission was critical for success. Fortunately, Dr. Lopez had used Nutrient Workflow Automation Platform, formerly Integrify, at her previous organization, and she knew its immense benefits firsthand. She immediately began to advocate to implement Nutrient Workflow. When asked if she had the capacity to run the software, she shared, “I will make the time, because I really believe that this will help the organization, and that’s all it’s done. It’s just one of the best decisions that we have made.”

Immediately after implementing Nutrient Workflow, Village for Vets started seeing the potential of the platform, as Dr. Lopez and her team began building out workflows to replace inefficient processes that were previously handled through email. And now? “It’s just a part of our everyday function,” Dr. Lopez shared.

The sheer variety of these workflows, ranging from financial aid to healthcare, demonstrates how flexible and enterprise-ready the platform is. In addition to making Village for Vets’ temporary financial assistance request process more efficient, ‌the team has also automated the following processes:

• Vehicle request process
• Audit process for compliance
• Lyft request process
• Temporary financial assistance processes — one for credit cards, and one for checks
• Emergency fund process, specific to donations received outside of federal funding
• Moving assistance process
• Vehicle checkout request process
• Healthcare navigation workflow
• Specialist referral workflow

Village for Vets quickly discovered that Nutrient Workflow was an ideal fit for its needs, as it allowed the company to incorporate approval stages into its workflow procedures. These multiple levels of approval were necessary, as they were an essential part of ensuring compliance with federal grant requirements. “Nutrient saves us in terms of audits, preserves our grant, and helps us ‌improve ‌our relationships with our community partners,” Dr. Lopez said.

Faster approvals, stronger connections

Nutrient has given Village for Vets’ team a sense of relief when it comes to documentation. There’s no more chasing down documents; it’s all in the Workflow Automation system and can be located at any time. By utilizing document-centric expertise, the platform handles the generation of documents in-platform, enabling case managers to focus on people, not paperwork. As Dr. Lopez said, “I wanted systems that give case managers more time with participants, not on documentation. They should focus on getting to know, supporting, and providing what our program promises.”

Nutrient also helped the organization benefit from ‌an improved turnaround time for process approvals. Prior to Workflow Automation, processes that were accomplished via email would take up to a week’s worth of time from start to finish. Now, processes take as little as two days. And if they’re urgent, some processes can even be completed in a single day. Incorporating Workflow Automation has improved internal communication by streamlining discussions between case managers, supervisors, and accounting through the built-in discussion tab.

With Nutrient Workflow’s support, Village for Vets was able to solve its documentation crisis, moving from a risky mix of spreadsheets and PDFs to a simple, compliant workflow. What used to take a week now takes a day. And what used to take case managers away from clients is now a simple process that keeps grants, builds community trust, and gives veterans the help they need. Looking ahead, Village for Vets is confident that Nutrient will scale with its mission.