Finance

Article Dean Dorton

This blog is the April Edition of our CFO Minute: A Sage Intacct ERP Series.

THE BLAIR INTEGRATION PROJECT–Integrations between systems are important- but they become even more crucial if your day-to-day tasks include taking on the looming responsibility of manually rekeying in data from system to system. Sound familiar?

Stop the madness with manual entry!

With a company’s utilization of different systems for things like expense management, payroll, grant management, CRM tracking- you name it- it gets tough to effectively track financial data, trends, progress, and get the actual accuracy you need regarding your organization’s financial and operational status. The pressure is on for finance leaders, who have the challenging responsibility of making sure that data from various systems matches the information in the company’s accounting system. But…What if your organization had the ability to pull external data from any of your existing systems into your financial management system?

Sage Intacct Integration Capabilities

Sage Intacct- the leader in cloud-based financial management and the only AICPA-preferred solution- allows you to streamline business processes with automatic two-way communication between your business systems. With Sage Intacct’s open API and complex integration capabilities, you can go the modern-day route of cloud accounting and say bye-bye to hours of inputting and exporting all your information into one system manually. This means your finance leaders can focus on overall strategic activities for the business instead of putting data into spreadsheets all day. Sage Intacct’s built-in financial intelligence allows it to integrate seamlessly with the solutions you currently have in place- or allows you to add new applications as you go.

It’s all about flexibility and what YOU choose

 With an easy and seamless integration process, you have the flexibility to connect Sage Intacct with widely-used business systems like Salesforce CRM– or proprietary custom applications. There are a couple of different options that you can choose from:

  • Pre-built connections. Access preconfigured system-to-system connections that are built into Sage Intacct, or available through the Sage Intacct Marketplace. These types of “pre-built” integrations make it easy for you to set up and configure your connection.
  • Custom connections. Alternately, you can work with Dean Dorton to easily create your own custom connections using the web services API. For example, Dean Dorton’s lead developers have created mConnect, a customizable integration for ConnectWise and Sage Intacct.
  • Dean Dorton’s Marketplace Partners: Check out the partners that work with us that are add-ons for your Sage Intacct instance

Article Dean Dorton

This blog is the March Edition of our CFO Minute: A Sage Intacct ERP Series.

INVASION OF THE AUDIT SNATCHERS– Let’s face it. The idea of an audit can be easier in theory than in practice. For nonprofit organizations, the greater the competition for funding, the greater the increase in audit scrutiny- and your organization should be prepared.

The overall goal is to earn a “clean” unqualified opinion from your auditor. With this being said, the key to audit readiness is keeping up with well-documented transactions and balances. 

Why Do Audits Matter to Nonprofits? (or at least they should!)

Public Record & Transparency: The push for complete transparency in the nonprofit space is stronger than ever- potential donors, grantors, and government authorities can look to public resources such as GuideStar to review a nonprofit’s audited financials. Keep in mind that the data that donors and stakeholders see can impact their charitable decisions in the future.audits for nonprofits

Grant Requirements: What nonprofit DOESN’T want to be eligible for grants?! A clean, audit-ready financial statement can make or break the decisions of grantors. Many grants require submission of audited financial statements as part of the grant application process- so make sure you are appropriately tackling that, along with the due diligence process.

Accounting Standard Changes: Surprise! Did you know that all nonprofit organizations are now in the time period where implementation IS A MUST? What does this mean? Ensuring compliance with state and federal guidelines from an audit perspective is absolutely necessary in order to get an unmodified audit opinion, especially considering that FASB now recognized that nonprofits are “different” than other organizations.

Reporting Submission Deadlines: Granting organizations, especially government organizations, offer virtually no flexibility on submission deadlines for a complete application and all of its attachments- one of those is most likely to be your audited financials. Avoid having your finance team scrambling around in the office to pull together all your nonprofit financial data.

Don’t Kill Your Reputation

The best thing your nonprofit can do if the audit snatchers come is BE PREPARED. Your organization’s finance team is responsible for the preparation and fair representation of its financial statements, including implementation aspects and making sure all financial data is free from material misstatement- whether due to fraud or error.

Ensuring a clean, error-free audit-ready financial statement is critical when it comes to your nonprofit’s reputation. Overall, you need to be able to show what exactly your nonprofit is doing, how you’re doing it, and what your impact is as you pursue your mission.

How Can Sage Intacct Help?

audit ready financials for nonprofitsTired of QuickBooks or that 10-year old accounting system that definitely isn’t scaling while your nonprofit is? Learn how Sage Intacct, the leader in cloud-based financial management, is helping nonprofits- big and small- automate their tracking for funds, donors, and grants, along with helping organizations pull accurate audit-ready financial statements in just a few clicks!

Want further clarification on the information above or want to learn how Dean Dorton can help your nonprofit when it comes to financial management? Contact us!

In the Meantime…Check out the Meals on Wheels Case Study!

You’ve probably heard of Meals on Wheels… a unique and well-known nonprofit helping communities all across America. Check out their case study and how Sage Intacct helped them cut audit preparation time by 60%. (Fun fact: Don Miller, our March CFO Minute participant, was previously the CFO at Meals on Wheels!)

Article Dean Dorton

MSPs face a unique set of challenges when it comes to growth. But the daunting task of scaling your financial management processes and systems to accommodate your rapidly increasing workload is not impossible.

To grow your systems with your company’s success, 4 new mandates can help ease the process:

Modernize Your Infrastructure 

MSPs cannot afford downtime. To mitigate resource-expending bottlenecks, productivity lapses, or service failures, MSPs are wise to embrace modern infrastructures that streamline processes and bridge gaps between finance and project management.

When your teams begin working with a financial management solution designed to support MSPs and contract-based services companies, revenue recognition is more automated, time and expense capture and approvals happen more quickly, billing errors are reduced.

This means finance’s job becomes easier, and the project management’s forecasting becomes clearer. Strong cloud-based financial management solutions often offer much more than just a financial picture. Today’s software can feature key metrics for not just finance, but for operations and project management as well, for a more comprehensive view of company performance.  

Support the Full Project Lifestyle

For an MSP’s success, service quality is priority #1. An ideal financial processes situation for modern MSPs will be capable of supporting project management’s entire life cycle to ensure reliable service.

The most effective way to ensure your company’s teams can access and fully utilize tracking and reporting systems is to ensure your systems’ ease of use. If your teams find it too time-consuming, complex or difficult to use the tracking and validating systems in place, the confidence in your data, and ultimately your service will degrade quickly.

Access Insights Into Key Metrics 

With your on-premises system, are you able to see into whether your projects are staying with time and budgetary margins? If not, your company is not using technology to its fullest capabilities to harness success.

When MSPs work in the cloud, they get real-time insights into budget variances, and tracking on budgeted, billed and actual numbers, for quality control, project targets, and continued focus on customer satisfaction.

Convert Data Into Performance 

Data retrieved from cloud-based systems ensures that your key metrics always offer updated views into performance.

Not only can the cloud offer historical data for decision-making based on past performance, but it can offer to-the-minute insights for stronger forecasts, more strategic sales plans, and smarter bids for enhanced growth.

Sage Intacct, a best-in-class financial management solution offers what MSPs need with:

  • Strong automation for more accuracy and resource control.
  • Comprehensive views into key metrics from highly customizable dashboards.
  • Metering for billing to be based on pay-as-you-use, as well as other modifiable frequencies to fit your service design.
  • Scalable features to add in or remove users, permissions, entities, or locations, to fit your level of growth.

If your business is still working with on-premises systems, reach out!  It may be time to explore a more modern solution, and we can help.

Article Dean Dorton

This post can also be found from Massey Consulting on ERPSoftwareBlog.

Are we living in the age of big data? If the numbers are any indication, the answer is a definite “yes.” By 2020, our digital universe will hold an astounding 44 zettabytes of data. That’s exactly 44 trillion gigabytes of social media posts, smart device data, and multimedia content.

The IDC predicts that 3rd Platform technologies (cloud, big data analytics, social media, and mobile) will drive 75% of IT spending in 2019. These technologies are supported by innovations in AR/VR (augmented/virtual reality), robotics, and AI.

The big data paradigm has certainly taken the business world by storm. Increasingly, CIOs are either answering to or closely collaborating with CFOs. Big data now drives key decisions about capital expenditures and operating budgets. The financial aspects are familiar to CFOs. The real challenge, however, lies in deciding what types of data to aggregate, analyze, and base procurement decisions on.

This is where Sage Intacct comes in with 6 analytical benefits for finance leaders.

1. Sage Intacct Allows You To Track The Right KPIs.

According to Deloitte’s 2017 4th Quarter CFO Signals report, CFOs are more focused on revenue growth than cost reductions (61% to 18%). In all, exactly 61% of CFOs from 8 major industries cite data analytics as the top influence in their business decisions.

Sage Intacct takes the mystery out of data analytics. Instead of sifting through a multiplicity of data streams, you can track the exact data you need. Your financial dashboards will show billable utilization rates, project overruns, net profit margins, and even sales per square foot.

Sales per square foot let you gauge business profitability, while billable utilization rates track employee performance. Most importantly, net profit margins reveal how effective your business is at extracting profit from total revenue.

These growth KPIs accurately show whether your organization is meeting revenue goals.

2. Sage Intacct Shows You Core Financials At A Glance

With Sage Intacct, you have core financials such as General Ledger, accounts payable/receivable, order management, cash flow, and the Digital Board Book at your fingertips.

The Digital Board Book is a unique addition to Intacct’s slate of bread-and-butter KPIs. It provides the kind of big data analytics every SaaS business relies on.

With SaaS metrics, you can track conversion rates, CAC (customer acquisition costs), CLTV (customer lifetime value), and churn. These KPIs reveal the extent to which your marketing campaigns are driving actual growth for your organization.

3. Sage Intacct Leads To Significant ROI Benefits

Sage Intacct lets you track financial and operational data in a way that makes sense for your organization. Interested in the kind of cost savings that increase profit margins? One of Massey’s customers, Legacy Healthcare, won the Sage Intacct Customer Success Award in October 2017. The multi-service and multi-entity healthcare provider organization achieved a 410% ROI increase with Sage Intacct and reduced month-end closing time by 60%.

4. Sage Intacct’s Cloud Model Saves Your Organization Money On CapEX 

Many CFOs distrust the pay-as-you-go model. After all, conventional systems do come with a concrete benefit: cost predictability.
Where Sage Intacct comes into the picture is its ability to free up your time. Now, you can track the most important KPIs that drive growth instead of redirecting focus towards IT infrastructure management. Because Sage Intacct is a subscription-based service, you’ll see reduced CapEx costs.

With automated processes, your business will become more agile; you’ll achieve faster time-to-market ratios and reap higher revenues.

5. Sage Intacct Lets You Track True Project Costs

Sage Intacct’s dashboards reveal each project’s indirect and direct costs. These statistics immediately show which of your projects are the most profitable. Armed with this knowledge, you can modify your marketing campaigns, procurement efforts, and inventory processes accordingly. Worried about shadow IT expenses? Keep a close watch on them with Intacct’s direct and indirect cost reporting.

6. Sage Intacct Makes Collaborative Effort Between You And Your CIO Effortless

With Sage Intacct, you can share annual budgets, sales reports, and departmental financials with the CIO. According to a Forbes Insight study, 96% of executives consider collaborative effort between CIOs and CFOs important for business success. In line with this consensus, Sage Intacct facilitates data-driven decisions that lead to revenue growth.

If these numbers sound good, but you have more questions, contact us. We’ll be happy to talk solutions with you.

Article Dean Dorton

Colleges and universities across the nation are being monitored closely amidst closings of high-profile institutions such as ITT Technical Institute and St. Catharine College, to name a few.

Join us for a webinar in conjunction with Jim Newberry of Steptoe & Johnson, PLLC, as we review some of the key factors that can cause your institution’s operations to be questioned and methods you can implement creating a path toward success. The webinar will cover:

  • The Perils of Heightened Cash Monitoring
  • Administrative Capability Required for FSA Participation
  • Financial Capability Required for FSA Participation
  • Avoiding the Most Frequently Occurring Audit and Program Review Findings

Avoiding Major Student Financial Aid Problems without Learning the Forms
Date: Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Time: Noon – 1:00 p.m. EDT
Cost: Free

Register NowAbout the Presenters

Crissy Fiscus (Dean Dorton Allen Ford, PLLC) provides audit, accounting, and consulting services to higher education institutions throughout Kentucky and leads Dean Dorton’s college and university team. Her client roster includes institutions with up to $1 billion in assets. Her audit experience includes both public and private institutions and affiliated entities. Crissy specializes in Student Financial Aid and her experience includes providing assistance with DOE program review, assistance with designing student financial aid policies and procedures, and performing agreed-upon procedures necessary for Economically Disadvantaged Appeals.

Jim Newberry (Steptoe & Johnson, PLLC) focuses his practice in the areas of higher education, government relations, and regulatory matters and is the leader of the law firm’s higher education practice. He has addressed multiple governance issues for nonprofit boards, drafted fundraising and gift acceptance policies, represented multiple institutions in investigating Title IX complaints, and represented multiple institutions in addressing Clery compliance issues throughout his career.

Article Dean Dorton

Recent economic volatility, financial reporting changes, and increased competition for donations has placed greater emphasis on managing resources and strategic decision making. Not-for-profit organizations that have active, qualified finance committees will have a competitive advantage in these uncertain times.

In this article we will explore the purpose and responsibilities of a finance committee, composition and structure of the committee and nonprofit finance committee best practices.

Nonprofit Finance Committee Purpose and Responsibilities

The main responsibility of the finance committee is to ensure that the institution is operating in a financially sustainable manner by balancing short-term and long-term obligations and goals. In order to fulfill this purpose, board members have certain roles and responsibilities:

  • Carry out the governing board’s fiduciary responsibility to ensure the organization’s mission and purpose are fulfilled by:
    • Gaining an understanding of how the organization is financially supported/capitalized
    • Assessing risks, internal and external, that may have a financial impact on the organization
    • Monitoring the organization’s financial efficiency
  • Provide financial guidance to the board of trustees through:
    • Assessing how to protect the organization’s resources
    • Overseeing the budgeting process to ensure that they are based on reasonable assumptions, aligned with organizational goals and that they are properly monitored
  • Determine what is possible given the available resources of the organization
    • Stay involved with other committees regarding new projects and expenditures
  • Assist management in executing the strategic goals of the organization by:
    • Establishing guardrails for management regarding their financial decision making authority
    • Ensuring management has the resources and skills required to facilitate proper internal controls
  • Timely communication of all pertinent issues to the board of directors

Financial reports and budgets are two significant tools at the committee’s disposal to effectively and efficiently perform their vital governance role. Financial statements have a retrospective focus in that financial statements, for the most part, report what has already happened while budgets have more of a forward looking focus, projecting what will happen in the future.

Ratio analysis (using common ratios to determine metrics such as asset turnover, profitability, leverage, and program expenses) can be utilized to help an organization identify negative trends before they become problems. Budgets should be reviewed by questioning the underlying financial assumptions of the budget and comparing them to historical data for reasonableness. Reconciliation between the financial statements and the budgets can also be an effective tool for the committee.

During this reconciliation, the committee works with management to explain significant variances. This process not only helps to understand past performance but is also useful in the development of the next period’s budget.

Nonprofit Finance Committee Composition and Structure

Since the finance committee plays such a vital role in the board’s governance of the organization, it is important to determine who should serve on the committee. The committee should comprise a chair and a vice chair for direction and focus. It should also include members of other key committees such as the student affairs committee, academic affairs committee, and other committees that oversee vital functions of the institutions. This will improve communication and cooperation between the finance committee and other committees.

Members should serve for terms of at least four to five years and the terms should be staggered to promote continuity. Oftentimes, the chief financial officer, budget officer, and chief accounting officer will serve as staff of the committee, and the president of the organization will attend committee meetings. Once again, this serves to aid communication and cooperation between management and the finance committee which is integral to effective governance.

In general, the finance committee should have the skills necessary to fulfill its responsibilities and be structured in a way that fosters communication and cooperation between other committees, the board, and management.

Nonprofit Finance Committee Best Practices

Below are a list of best practices for finance committees:

  • Chair of finance committee and board chair should define the scope and responsibilities of the finance committee
  • In spring or early summer, the finance committee chair and CFO should meet to coordinate the committee’s annual work and identify/discuss any key issues facing the organization
  • Chair should communicate the work plan to the rest of the committee and the board
  • At each board meeting, the finance committee chair should deliver a status update including information on budget to actual results, emerging trends, and expenditure recommendations

A typical work plan might include the following:

  • Late spring – Committee chair, CFO, and president meet to develop work plan and discuss key issues, internal and external, facing the organization
  • Early summer – Adopt annual budgets, both operational and capital
  • Fall – Review financial results for prior year and use to evaluate the reasonableness of the current budgets; discuss significant changes in key financial metrics
  • Winter – Re-examine revenue projections and discuss and agree on a set of budgetary assumptions for the following year
  • Spring – Study changes in revenue estimates and make recommendations for updates

Article written by Tom Smither, Supervisor of Assurance Services

Citations

Stafford, Ingrid. “The Finance Committee”. AGB Effective Committee Series. 2013