From Acquisition to Clean Books: How Powell Gardens Did It in One Day

The Context: An Acquisition

Powell Gardens is a beloved botanical garden and community institution with deep roots in the Kansas City area. Like many nonprofits, it runs on a diverse mix of revenue — grants, donations, and earned income from ticket sales, events, and programming. Complex finances, managed cleanly inside Sage Intacct, a cloud-based accounting platform built for organizations like theirs.

In early 2026, an unexpected opportunity landed on their doorstep: the chance to acquire Colonial Gardens, a local garden center and plant nursery, out of bankruptcy. The deal moved fast and closed in late February. Suddenly, that clean accounting setup was about to get a lot more complicated.

The Problem: One System, Two Locations, 3,400 Transactions

With the acquisition, two physical locations now had to coexist inside one legal entity, each with separate budgets, separate operational tracking, and a clean audit trail.

Powell Gardens had always operated as a single campus, so their system was set up without a location dimension in Sage Intacct. Now, with two sites, we had to build that structure and backfill it across every transaction already on the books.

So we had three distinct problems to solve:

1. Build the new structure. Create a location for both Powell Gardens and Colonial Gardens within the existing Intacct entity.
2. Migrate the budget. Move the entire 2026 budget down to the new Powell Gardens location, and build a fresh budget for Colonial.
3. Reclassify 3,400 transaction lines. Every entry posted in January and February needed to be reassigned to the correct location.

Steps one and two were manageable; Intacct's export/import tools handled the budget migration cleanly. Step three was the real problem.

The Solution: API and AI as Data Engineering Tools

Traditionally, this kind of problem would be solved manually — an accountant would rebuild the budget structure in spreadsheets, map each line item to the new location, and reclassify every transaction one-by-one. That's at least two weeks of tedious data work.

Rather than framing this as a problem for accounting, we took a data engineering approach. That meant we used tools most accounting firms wouldn't reach for.

With Intacct alone, there was no simple way to reclassify those 3,400 transactions in bulk. But Intacct has a REST API — a communication layer that could allow us to reach directly into the system and update records at scale. The API would do the heavy lifting, but we still needed to build the code to drive it. Using AI, we were able to accomplish this in just a few hours.

Together, these tools allowed us to systematically identify every affected line, verify the correct location assignment, and push the update instantaneously. Of the 3,400 transaction lines, all but 13 updated cleanly via the API. Those remaining were resolved in 15 minutes by journal entry.

The Takeaway: Systems-Level Thinking Changes What's Possible

A traditional accounting approach would have involved weeks of manual work and significant disruption to an already busy post-acquisition period. But in treating it like a data migration, we completed the entire project in a single day, with no interruption to Powell Gardens's daily operations.

They entered March 2026 with a fully updated system: all 2026 budget data correctly assigned at the new location level, all year-to-date transactions aligned, and two operationally distinct sites tracked cleanly within one entity.

The Powell Gardens case highlights what the EBCFO approach looks like in practice: we model accounting systems like data scientists and design them with actionable insight as the ultimate goal — and when the architecture is right, accuracy and compliance flow naturally.