If your nonprofit provides programs and services, chances are they’re more than a valued and central resource to the community – they’re a crucial source of revenue and core to fulfilling your mission.
Unfortunately, we know managing these programs and services can be complex on a daily basis for a variety of reasons. In our “Managing the Challenges of Programs and Services” webinar, we talked through many of these challenges and best practices for efficiently and proactively addressing them. Ease the frustration and read these five headaches that can be avoided by using a fund accounting system:
1. Delays and frustration when you need to access a client’s records or payment history.
It’s inevitable that clients will have questions after they’ve received a service or have made a payment. When you’re unable to quickly and easily access client records and reports on which services were provided, the process becomes more than time consuming; it’s just plain frustrating for everyone involved. With the right fund accounting system, you should be able to track service and payments to a detail level, and generate reports that provide this information when you need it most.
2. Difficulty tracking eligibility for services down to the penny.
If any of your programs are grant funded, proper allocation, tracking, and reporting of this funding is essential, but you also need visibility into whether clients are eligible for funding. By tracking eligibility at both the client and program levels, your system should allow you to monitor eligibility on an ongoing basis.
3. Manual manipulation of spreadsheets to get the right information you need.
You may currently be spending hours knee-deep in Excel, creating pivot tables to get to the level of information for oversight of your programs. And, we all know manual reporting tasks don’t scale – as your programs grow and reporting demands increase, the time you spend on generating those reports will only increase as well. With MIP Fund Accounting™, you can create a segmented structure that scales with your organization, regardless of how many programs or funding sources you add.
4. Accidentally leaving money on the table.
Your budget next year will depend on your current funders and whether they have confidence in the commitments they’ve made with your organization. Being able to accurately report on how funds were used is crucial to illustrate transparency and a history of compliance, which helps ensure future funding.
5. Juggling multiple reporting requests on limited time.
Does it ever feel impossible to satisfy all of your stakeholders’ reporting requests? Juggling individual stakeholders’ needs for information can be overwhelming at times, but with configurable reporting you should be able to generate the right reports with ease, at any time. From financial summaries to client-level detail reports, your fund accounting system should provide the ability to easily manipulate and save report formats to keep this information at your fingertips.
Learn more about how MIP Fund Accounting™ can reduce your finance-related headaches and boost productivity.
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