Nonprofit Budget Creation & Support Software

As a nonprofit leader, budgeting is your chief responsibility. MIP offers nonprofit financial officers and executives a robust set of budget creation and support software features that make nonprofit budgeting a breeze.

Whether you just concluded your budget review for the last fiscal year or are about to start your budget planning for the next fiscal year, learn how MIP fund accounting can meet your unique set of nonprofit accounting software needs.

Here, we’ll share the critical components of nonprofit budget creation and support tools using MIP.  Discover how to plan, create, track, modify and collaboratively report your finances and spending to stakeholders. Our top nonprofit accounting software presents an alternative to toiling away on spreadsheets or using generic bookkeeping solutions not built with nonprofits in mind.

Let’s dive in!

The Budget Capabilities of MIP

What are the outstanding benefits and nonprofit budgeting capabilities of MIP?

First, MIP is tailor-made for the unique accounting software needs of nonprofits and government organizations. Typically, nonprofits and government institutions consist of different departments, run several events and programs simultaneously and may get their funding from various sources. With MIP, you can collaboratively build and track budgets and maintain complete visibility across different departments and programs using the segmentation feature to monitor your budget and spending.

How does this work?

MIP allows you to collaboratively create budgets using the various department, funding and project structures unique to your organization. MIP lets you segment your funding sources, programs and departments across your organization. Whatever arrangement you set up cascades across the system and influences activities such as posting, purchasing approval and even encumbrances.

The benefits of this are two-fold.

First, this collaborative budget process eliminates the siloes of data that occur when you use spreadsheets to create and manage your nonprofit’s budgets. Also, your organization does not suffer the consequences of repetitive tasks, data loss or costly mistakes that may occur with moving data on spreadsheets across the organization.

MIP also provides capabilities for building future budgets year over year. Using historical data, you possess the flexibility to cross over fiscal years in creating your budget. With the dashboard feature, your team can continuously and easily monitor your budget progress and drill down to more data if needed.

For your nonprofit organization to properly manage its budget and stay within its financial capabilities, encumbrances help keep your budget on track. Using MIP, you can set up budget tolerance levels to alert you to looming issues, protect your budget integrity and avoid overspending. You can send alerts via email to different people or receive them on the message center on your dashboard.

For example, you can set alerts for expenditures that exceed a specific dollar amount, which lets you monitor how you spend your donor dollars.

Things change, and when they do, you want to ensure your organization can adapt. The most significant benefit of using MIP is that your budget and financial stability become more flexible.

For example, in one month, you may receive more or less funding than you projected. With MIP fund accounting, you can easily make these changes to your accounting, while still retaining the previous version of the original budget to enable easy comparison.

MIP’s budget worksheet interface resembles Microsoft Excel but with superpowers — so it does not require a new learning curve. The copy/paste features are similar, and you can set up custom formulas as needed. MIP accounting is tools-focused and requires fewer intensive formulas and manual spreadsheet manipulations that can be prone to costly mistakes.

You can create unlimited budget worksheets, set up customized accounting charts and collect information the way you want to. To make navigation easy for you and your employees, MIP is a workday-adaptive financial planning software. On MIP, you can set the default page you want to display upon startup to save you time. For example, you can set budgeting as your default startup page if you primarily work on budgeting.

Fraud Detection and Prevention on MIP

According to a MIP finance and accounting study, 34% of organizations say they undertake activities that can put them at risk of fraud. Also, fraudulent activities can go unnoticed in large organizations, adversely affecting them for months. Often, fraudulent activities don’t get uncovered until quarterly or yearly audits. This delay can provide enough time for a potential fraud to bankrupt your organization.

To protect your organization against fraud, MIP comes with built-in features that help control budgets and reduce or catch unethical activities before they negatively impact your organization.

With built-in encumbrances, you can set transaction alerts to either prevent posting or warn you when spending exceeds specific dollar amounts. You can set alerts on your payroll to check salary frauds to ensure no fraudulent activities occur in employee payment. Also, you can get notified of activities such as a change in vendor names, unauthorized logins, organization fund level, and more.

For example, you can set up spending alerts for transactions above $500 and prevent the posting and hold it off for approval or revision.

Another form of security and control comes with your ability to set different levels of access and users to your budget worksheet. In MIP, you can use permissions to give some users “executive view” status. This oversight enables you to grant access to different budgets in your organization and allows various people — other than the administrator —  to work on budgets together in a controlled and regulated environment. With this feature, you can enforce budget integrity, promote transparency and regulate the levels of budget access different people in your organization possess. People with executive view licenses would not see other people’s budgets — only the one they have permission to access.

Seamless and Flexible Nonprofit Reporting With MIP

MIP comes with a robust and highly modularized easy reporting system, which means stakeholders in your budget process can create multiple reports for different activities. For example, you can create various reports for your accounts receivable, accounts payable, spending comparisons, posted and unposted transactions, etc. You can quickly generate a report for anything you do in MIP with only a few clicks.

You can also create comparative reports across different timelines. For example, you can pull up a report that compares your current budget with the previous year to see the changes in your spending on the same page.

Budget reporting in MIP is very flexible. It provides many features for you to create customized reports of different types.

Intuitive Modules With a Simple Learning Curve

MIP accounting software is highly intuitive. Once you learn one module in MIP fund accounting, you can seamlessly flow into another without going through a steep learning curve.

More Budget Management Capabilities

Here are nine more budget management and customization features you’ll find in MIP nonprofit accounting software.

1. Easy worksheet manipulation: MIP has robust features that can help you manipulate your budget worksheets in groups or individual cells. For example, you can increase the values of a group of cells by a specific dollar amount, by a given percentage or set each cell to a fixed dollar amount, all based on the demands of the task you’re working on.
2. Collaborative budgeting: Stakeholders can collaborate on the same budget worksheet, and when the budget receives approval, you can post it to the general ledger.
3. Detailed tracking of budget activities: MIP tracks and records the activities and actions completed on the budget worksheet for history and reference purposes.
4. Easy collaboration and documentation with notes: If you want to document intricate activities on your budget worksheet, you can create a note in MIP. You can easily reference this note anytime or send it to other stakeholders working on the budget to help them understand your work on the budget.
5. Fast navigation with filters: You can also use the filters feature to navigate through different sections of your worksheet if you want to view various parts of your budget individually.
6. Seamless file attachment: In whatever module you work on MIP, you can attach external files. Whether it’s in your general ledgers, your accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, grants, etc., you can seamlessly create folders and attach external files in different formats to help you work from one place. Also, you can generate forms on MIP.
7. Multiple worksheet revision: To make it straightforward for you to report changes on your budgets, MIP creates revision worksheets for every change you make to your worksheet after posting it to your general ledger. For example, if you modified the amount for a particular grant on your general ledger, MIP will create a revised budget worksheet containing the changes made so you can easily compare your original budget across several changes and make more accurate reports. This feature also helps promote transparency in your system.
8. Automated setup wizards: Getting set up on MIP is simple. MIP has a setup wizard that takes you through the workflow of setting your budget type, account type, segmentation and all the fundamental information you’d need for your budget.
9. Customizable budget lifecycles: While the budget cycle defaults to monthly, you can modify this to whatever cycle you need. For example, you can make your budget lifecycle quarterly, monthly or yearly — whatever suits your organizational needs.

Cloud or On-Premise — MIP Fits All Your Needs

To promote our mission of creating customized solutions to meet your specific organizational needs, MIP is available on the cloud and on-premise. That means you can either have the software installed on your computers in your offices or access it online using a web browser.

With MIP Accounting Software, Help Is Only a Click Away

To make budgeting stress-free for you, we created an efficient, user-friendly support system. Our customer support team is highly responsive. We have a knowledge base that contains everything you need to know to use MIP like a pro. We also integrated a feedback product enhancement feature where you can submit feature requests to the MIP team to consider.

So you don’t worry when you get stuck working on a task, we have robust help links that contain process checklists and resources that can guide you through how to complete crucial tasks on MIP.  At all times, help is only a click away.

Learn More About MIP Software and What It Can Do for Your Nonprofit

We created a vast educational resource to help you easily learn MIP fund accounting and how MIP software can supercharge your donor dollar management. Learn more in-depth from our MIP University.

New to MIP? MIP is a fund accounting solution purpose-built for nonprofit organizations and government institutions to meet their unique budgeting needs.

Unlike commercial businesses, nonprofit funds accounting requires unique considerations. If your primary funding source is donations, dues or grants, your tasks may involve additional budgeting, spending, planning, auditing, and reporting needs and restrictions.

We built MIP to provide for all your nonprofit budgeting and reporting needs and help you make more informed use of donor dollars. MIP fund accounting grows with your organization, helping you prepare for the future and effectively manage your bottom line.

Contact our team to request a demo or discuss how MIP can help your nonprofit today.