It’s Budget Reporting Time – Resources and Tips

“The budget is not just a collection of numbers, but an expression of our values and aspirations.” – Jack Lew

Are you working on your budget reporting? Are you toward the end of your fiscal year and identifying next year’s services, mission and plans for growth? Are your donors, grant funders, and board anxious to see customized reports detailing what you’ve accomplished?

We know this is the busiest time of year for organizations as tax reporting is due as well as many are planning for fiscal year end and next year’s budgets. We wanted to share some good tips on budget reporting and some online resources for you as well on budgeting tips overall.

Budget reporting not only provides insights for you and your agency, but it also ensures you’re able to reflect and compare year over year, where growth might be and where resources need to be reallocated. Budget reporting capabilities should also include the ability to track and budget for multi-year projects and grants.  For instance, you’ll want to be able to configure a budget comparison report for your donors, funders and your board that is easily understandable.

You’ll also want your budget solution to always give you a consistently clear picture of your current budget position throughout this year of resilience.

4 key questions to consider about your budgeting solution if include:

1. Can we easily generate budget performance reports, including basic budget to actual comparisons?
2. Can we produce an unlimited number of budget scenarios/versions?
3. Does our solution have a way to enforce budget controls to avoid overspending?
4. Is our budget creation and maintenance process completely offline in spreadsheets?

Our MIP solution, brings powerful, integrated functionality relating to comparing budget to actual, both on an organization-wide basis, and on either a grant, a program, or a departmental basis – depending on the type of organization for whom you work.

And take heart, no matter where you’re at in the budget process we wanted to also provide some good resources below that might help you along with your overall nonprofit budgeting

• A Guide to Nonprofit Budgeting on DonorBox (plus a free template)
• Council of Nonprofits Tools/Resources for budgeting
• Nonprofit Works

And if you’re ready to see MIP in action for a short demo, please request via our demo page –  and we’ll be in touch!