For municipalities, accounting tends to look different from accounting for private companies and nonprofit organizations. Local governments often receive funding from multiple sources, such as grants and taxpayer dollars, and the strict accounting standards set by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) can make finance and accounting consulting essential for government agencies.
If you’re seeking a fund accounting solution for municipal accounts and consulting, turn to us at MIP®. We can offer consulting and accounting advice that’s specific to your organization. Along with consulting and accounting, our team of experienced professionals can deliver training and implementation services and ensure our solution meets your organization’s exact needs.
Functions of Local Government Accounting Software
When you choose MIP Fund Accounting®, you receive the following comprehensive features and functions:
- Budgeting: With the budgeting function, you can create as many budgets and versions as you like, such as proposed and approved budgets. You can easily copy a budget version to another version and add attachments, such as justifications or cover letters. Additionally, this function enables you to collaborate with stakeholders and send your budget to municipal partners who can incorporate your budget into their own.
- Reporting: With our reporting function, you can budget and report based on customized timeframes and create financial statements for several segments, such as locations, general ledger, departments, and projects. You can report on all of these segments while still maintaining the ability to report a comprehensive view of your finances. Classify your expenses by function, and for each fund, you can maintain separate, balanced books.
- Transactions: With our transactions function, you can easily track, pay, and segment transactions. Manage and bill out to customers within the system for utility billing. In combination with the utility billing platform from CUSI, easily handle your more complicated billing needs.
- Requisitions and purchasing: With our requisitions and purchasing function, you can increase the availability of information that can be used for pre-purchase decision-making. With the one-click budget checking tool, you can review the effects of current requests. When status changes occur to requisition requests, you’ll receive a notification via email.
- Bank reconciliation and cash management: With this function, your cash management information can be imported into MIP from your POS system. You can also improve your cash management by monitoring transactions and bank balances closely with our bank reconciliation module. If desired, you can create custom receipts with unique fields.
Fund Accounting for Government Agencies
Fund accounting is an accounting method that helps you keep your organization’s programs separated by fund numbers. Every fund contains a chart of accounts and is labeled as unrestricted, restricted, or temporarily restricted. Fund accounting is distinguished from regular accounting due to its emphasis on accountability over profitability, ensuring your board of directors is aware of where the money is coming from and where it’s going.
While nonprofit accounting and governmental fund accounting are similar, accounting is even more complicated for government organizations. Municipalities manage several organizations in a community, so budgeting is complex and funds must be distributed to give each community component the support it needs.
When your organization receives an award or grant, you can create a new fund for the grant’s specific purpose or apply this money to an existing fund. With a fund accounting solution, you can review your revenue and expense report to determine where your funds are and where they went. Every fund is unique and can be labeled in a variety of ways.
Auditing Needs for Local Government Agencies
When it comes to auditing, you’ll need to ensure your organization’s financial information adheres to the Governmental Auditing Standards. Along with changes to reporting and standards, the necessary information is increasing for the annual audit. For local governments, meeting higher auditing standards can be more difficult with all of the necessary information that must be gathered.
Government organizations put greater restrictions on fund usage, requiring enhanced compliance. Because government budgets can change often due to partisan influence, your funding could be inconsistent. With the government fund accounting solution from MIP®, we can help ensure your audit preparation is completed with best practices.
The right technology can assist you during an audit with various functions, such as:
- Access to documentation
- Classification of net assets
- Generation of P&L statements
- A general ledger that’s fully auditable
- Prevention of errors and fraud with automation
- Control over the way your personnel can access your financial systems
Our solution can simplify audit reports, tracking every dollar and collecting all of the necessary documentation for an audit. MIP Fund Accounting® offers complete transparency prior to, during, and following the audit process.
Accounting and Utility Billing
When you use MIP®, your organization can easily:
- Track transactions between funds
- Improve budgetary accounting
- Track restrictions on net assets
- Report and track future budget commitments
- Produce financial statements that are unique to the government space
- Allocate costs automatically and accurately between several cost centers
- Report and maintain your binding budget to satisfy government regulations
And while MIP® handles utility billing confidently, its capabilities can be increased with an integration with CUSI’s Utility Billing platform. Together with CUSI, you can benefit from a comprehensive accounting solution and CUSI’s utility billing platform work better together to create a complete billing and accounting solution for local governments. The combined platform features the following benefits and features:
- E-commerce
- Customer web portal
- Dashboards for utility billing
- Formats available for basic and advanced integration
- Meter reads imported into your accounting platform as charges
- Automatic updates to financial activity based on the utility’s requirements
- Data flows freely between your accounting database and the utility billing database
- Flexible chart of accounts facilitates an unlimited transfer of data from your general ledger
Request a Free Demo of Fund Accounting Software for Local Government
To get the best government fund accounting software, turn to MIP®. We have more than 40 years of experience in handling the accounting needs of governments, utility organizations, and municipalities. Our comprehensive solution manages, reports, and tracks finances. MIP Fund Accounting® complies with complex government requirements and integrates with work asset management and billing and payment management.
We provide today’s leading fund accounting software for government and nonprofit organizations nationwide. Our solution enables you to easily manage your books and track unlimited funds. If you’re looking for software that allows you to manage your financial processes in a user-friendly system, request a free demo of MIP Fund Accounting® today.
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