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. Managing these programs and services can be complex on a daily basis for a variety of reasons.
Here are five ways that a true fund accounting system can help you reduce the complexity and manage your programs more easily.
1. Easily access client 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 detailed level, and generate reports that provide this information when you need it most.
2. Track grant funded eligibility for services down to the penny
If any of your programs are grant funded then 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. Scalability in reporting 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 a true fund accounting system you should be able to create a segmented structure that scales with your organization, regardless of how many programs or funding sources you add.
4. Transparency, compliance, and confidence
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. Configurable reporting and custom report formats
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.
If you’re interested in seeing how true fund accounting system can grow with your mission, – request a DEMO
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