Keystone Shared Services (KSS) is the operational platform through which Keystone Alliance offers back-office infrastructure to nonprofit organizations beyond its own family. Keystone Alliance is the parent organization — the shared home for KSS, our strategic consulting arm Mission + Strategy, and our founding organizations Glenkirk and Search360. KSS is what Keystone built for itself, now available to the broader sector.

Keystone Shared Services (KSS) is an operational partnership — ongoing, embedded support for the back-office infrastructure that keeps your organization running: finance, accounting, payroll, IT systems, revenue cycle management.

Mission + Strategy is a strategic consulting practice focused on the decisions that shape your organization's direction: mergers and partnerships, succession planning, strategic planning, and capacity building.

The two are complementary and often work in sequence. Mission + Strategy frequently serves as the entry point for organizations that later engage KSS — and the assessment work M+S does often surfaces the operational needs that KSS is built to address.

No. “Shared” refers to the platform, the expertise, and the cost structure — not your data or information. Each participating organization operates in a fully confidential, walled-off environment. Your financials, client data, and operational details are never visible to other organizations on the platform.

Think of it like a secure office building: multiple tenants share the infrastructure — power, security, common areas — while each suite remains completely private.

You can absolutely start with just an assessment. Many organizations find the assessment valuable as a standalone deliverable — a clear picture of current state and a practical roadmap — without committing to anything further. The path forward is always shaped by what's most useful to your organization at each step. There is no obligation to continue beyond what serves you.

In most cases, existing finance staff remain in place — often in stronger roles with better infrastructure supporting them. Some organizations use an 'outpost model' where a current staff member serves as the day-to-day liaison to the Keystone Shared Services platform, maintaining local institutional knowledge while connecting to deeper operational support.

The goal is never to displace people. It's to build a better system around them.

Discovery can begin as soon as both parties are ready — typically within one to two weeks of an initial conversation. The assessment timeline depends on scope, but most initial assessments are completed within four to six weeks. Implementation timelines vary based on the complexity of the engagement and the organization's current state.

We'll give you a clear picture of timeline expectations before any work begins.

Our platform expertise — particularly in Medicaid billing, eligibility management, and I/DD-specific revenue cycle — is strongest for organizations in the intellectual and developmental disabilities sector.

For nonprofit organizations outside I/DD, Mission + Strategy's financial assessment and capacity-building services draw on the same operational foundation and are designed for the broader sector. The first conversation will help us identify where in the Keystone ecosystem you'll find the best fit — and we'll tell you honestly if we're not the right match.

A consulting engagement produces a recommendation. A fractional CFO fills a leadership role. Keystone Shared Services is an embedded operational partnership — the actual system we built inside our own organizations, operated by the team that built it, available to yours.

It's not advice about how your back office should work. It's the working back office.

Pricing is scoped based on the specific engagement — organizational size, scope of services, and systems complexity. We scope engagements individually because the right structure looks different for every organization.

The frame we'd encourage: benchmark the cost of Keystone Shared Services against what it costs to build, staff, and maintain the same functions internally — including the cost of turnover, coverage gaps, and the leadership bandwidth consumed by managing those functions. In most cases, the comparison favors the shared model significantly.

Success looks like a leadership team that has its time back. Financial reports that inform decisions rather than just describe history. A board that engages meaningfully with financial information. A billing and revenue cycle that runs reliably regardless of who's in the office that day.

The deeper measure is the one we've watched play out inside our own family of organizations over seventeen years: missions that grow stronger because the infrastructure underneath them finally has.

The honest answer is: you may not know until we talk. That's what discovery is for.

What we'd say to any leader sitting with this question: if you're spending time on back-office management that should be going toward your mission, if your finance function depends on people rather than systems, or if you've been wondering whether there's a better model — that's enough reason to have the first conversation.

We'll tell you what we see and what we think. No pressure. Just the coffee first.