fund accounting

Article Dean Dorton

From literacy to the environment, nonprofits support a diverse set of causes, but they all share core challenges, mostly financial. A recent survey found that growth/generating revenue, funding and donors, and fundraising were three of the top concerns for nonprofit leaders in 2018 and beyond. More than ever, nonprofit organizations need the right financial tools to be better stewards of their funds and fulfill their missions faster.

Modern fund accounting systems are built to help nonprofits manage their finances and address the challenges unique to their type of organization. Consider these three benefits:

– Better tracking of outcome metrics. With intense competition for donor dollars—and funders insisting on greater accountability and visibility—nonprofits must show fiscal responsibility as well as program results. Charity evaluators are diving deeper into nonprofit results—and they’re expanding their evaluations and criteria to include the tracking and reporting of non-financial performance and outcome metrics. These measure financial or non-financial criteria that reflect the efficacy of an organization, program, or initiative. Many nonprofits use their fund accounting software to measure across multiple dimensions for blended scorecards that encompass activities, capacities, financial results, and other metrics.

– Easier, more comprehensive grant reporting. A modern fund accounting system provides the reporting nonprofits need when applying for grants. It also assures the funder that the organization can report as needed should it receive the grant. “A fund accounting system makes it easier to create grant-specific reporting regardless of the funding period whether across multiple fiscal years or multiple programs,” noted Dawn Westerberg, an award-winning marketing consultant for software companies. “Fund accounting software also allows integration to other systems for outcome reporting.”

– Increased transparency across the organization. With dashboards that provide real-time visibility into data, fund accounting software gives you instant insights so you can proactively manage locations, programs, members, and funds. Program managers may look at metrics related to programs, locations, and budgets; grant managers may monitor grant renewals, new awards, and funding pipelines.

Best-in-class fund accounting software such as Sage Intacct can offer the visibility, automation, access, and adaptability you need to grow your organization and succeed. Whether you benefit from fast and easy reporting or automated processes that yield greater efficiencies, you will be a better steward of the funds you have.

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Article Dean Dorton

5 Reasons Why Cloud Accounting Software is Right for Nonprofits

It is becoming more and more common to see growing nonprofits swaying off their legacy systems. As your nonprofit organization grows, you reach a point where manual, time-consuming processes drain your productivity. Not having real-time visibility into key metrics and outcomes is hindering growth. To be a good steward, you need a system that makes use of the latest technology advancements. This means a modern accounting system that not only automates and streamlines core financial management functions but supports your growth and helps provide accountability and transparency. Today, inflexible, inefficient, and outdated on-premise accounting software is rapidly being replaced by a new class of modern cloud financial management solutions.

Here’s why:

1. You only pay for what you use. Legacy financial systems place the IT cost and maintenance burden on your organization. You’ve got servers for your application, database, backup, and probably more—and you need to keep up with changing hardware, software, and operating system versions over time. That level of technology maintenance alone is a full-time IT job—not a core responsibility of nonprofit accounting professionals. By contrast, the cloud software provider runs, maintains, and upgrades the software for you on its own secure, high-performance hardware, eliminating many of your IT costs.

2. Your data is safe in the cloud. The best cloud software has security covered from all angles: physical, network, application, and data. Your information is stored in highly data centers, with 24/7/365 operations and performance monitoring, continuous backups, and disaster recovery. Controlled permissions and access, firewalls, scanning, and data encryption further protect your organization’s data.

3. It supports a mobile workforce. Staff and volunteers can access the system anytime, anywhere—and on any device. Enter your data on your laptop, see information on your iPad, and approve transactions from your mobile phone. Unlike legacy solutions that awkwardly adapt decades-old screens for browsers, cloud fund accounting software is often designed from the start to offer a modern, intuitive user experience.

4. You’re always using the latest version. With on-premises software, you have to cope with painful upgrades or suffer through the limitations of outdated versions. Cloud software is automatically updated with no business disruption and no costly upgrade projects. You get instant access to the latest version as soon as it’s available, delivering greater value and less headache for your organization.

5. You get the best of everything with integrated solutions for nonprofits. Open APIs let you utilize best-in-class apps like CRM, donor management, fundraising, and payroll. Cloud fund accounting software is built to “talk” to your other best-in-class cloud systems with automated two-way, system-to-system communication. Web services APIs eliminate the need for complex business logic, and you have the flexibility to tailor your connections to your specific workflow processes.

Cloud financial management software like Sage Intacct can help you accomplish your mission by providing you the visibility, flexibility, efficiency, automation, and integration you need to succeed. Replacing and updating your old accounting solution with a modern, best-in-class cloud solution built for a nonprofit organization can cost less than you think—while saving you time and resources. 

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Article Dean Dorton

As a nonprofit, you have many stakeholders who require accurate information on budget, grants, outcomes, and more – and their requests usually come with a need to have the information now. If this causes chaos and either a rejection of the request or hours of manual work on spreadsheets, your accounting system is outdated.

It’s time to closely examine new solutions and new technology. Cloud applications have matured. Feature sets are robust. Reporting and dashboard capabilities are impressive in their flexibility and accessibility. And, the benefits of cloud technology are such that your system requirements should include “cloud-based” at the top of the list.

5 Ways Nonprofits Benefit from the Cloud

Here are five benefits that we’ve seen nonprofits enjoy when replacing entry level or legacy on-premise solutions with Intacct:

1. Empowerment of Department Heads and Executive Team

Imagine being able to respond to reporting requests with a few clicks. Better yet, imagine delivering a real-time dashboard to various program managers, department heads, your executive team and even the board that display the particular data, budgets, expenses, funding allocations and comparisons to prior years.
With Intacct, they have the information they need to fine tune programs, assess program financials and outcomes, and zero in on the data they need to further the mission, serve constituents, and win more grant awards.

2. Ability to Track Funds, Cross Fiscal Year Reporting

With Intacct’s flexible chart of accounts and dimensional reporting, managing, tracking, and reporting on funds is easy – whether the funding period is a few months or extending over multiple fiscal years. There is no need to once again resort to spreadsheets, you are able to generate reports directly from the system. In fact is so easy, colleagues can access reports on their own if need be.
Every stakeholder can have the ability to quickly analyze assigned grants, funds, budgets, expenses and cash flows – regardless of the duration of the funding. With better reporting on existing funds, more time can be spent going after additional sources of funding. Armed with Intacct, you’ll have the history, data, and pattern of compliance and good stewardship.

3. Faster, More Accurate Reporting

Accurate reporting is the primary responsibility of Nonprofit accounting. It is the foundation for transparency and accountability. Intacct has helped hundreds of nonprofits automate their reporting for faster period-end closings, cross-fiscal year funding, budget management, and program analysis.

Intacct Dimensions allows you to slice and dice data to accommodate special requests from colleagues, executive management and the board. You don’t need to fire up Excel and create yet another spreadsheet. This is perhaps the most compelling reason to replace your accounting system with cloud-based Intacct – the ability to generate a staggering variety of reports directly from the system (complete with detail documentation).

4. Budget-friendly, Subscription-based Pricing

Since Intacct is paid for via subscription, the cost of the software is accounted for month by month. Many nonprofits prefer this subscription-based pricing to traditional on-premise one time licensing fees. There is an initial implementation fee with Intacct, but following your implementation, it’s a simple monthly fee based on the number of users you want accessing the system.

Most of the time, there is a significant cost savings for nonprofits moving to the cloud. With the cloud, organizations can dramatically reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by eliminating hardware costs and reducing software and IT costs. With cloud computing, nonprofits also get the benefit of reducing their technology risk with enterprise-class security, backups, and disaster recovery – at a much lower cost than doing it yourself.

5. Anytime, Anywhere Secure Access

Snow day? No problem. Flooding? No problem. Regardless of what Mother Nature throws your way, while you might be prevented from getting to the office, you can still access Intacct. All you need is a browser, access to the Internet, and your user name and password.

While weather-related closures are (thankfully) rare, there is still a high cost in lost productivity. With anytime, anywhere secure access to Intacct you won’t have that problem. Under more normal circumstances like business-related travel, off site meetings, or the need to work from home, you have access to the system. Another advantage of cloud-based Intacct is that it doesn’t matter what kind of device you have – PC or Mac, tablet or laptop, you can get to the system directly without any intermediate interface.

We have looked at 5 ways nonprofits can benefit from the cloud – but there are many more.  With cloud technology making robust applications more affordable and easier to deploy, it’s time to take a serious look at what the cloud can do for your finance department and your organization.

Other Nonprofit resources from Massey Consulting:

White paper ’13 Questions Nonprofits Need to Ask When Buying a New Accounting System’