How Nonprofit Finance Teams Can Spend Less Time Gathering and More Time Analyzing Data
Nonprofit finance professionals play a critical role in tracking costs, donations, and operational expenses in order to assess financial health and keep the organization on track. Recent decreases in government reimbursements and donations mean nonprofit finance teams need to monitor the health of their organizations even more carefully. Tools that simplify tracking and reporting can help plan for new sources of revenue and strictly evaluate spending to prioritize the needs of those served.
Today’s Nonprofit Challenges
Do you find yourself struggling to track and analyze metrics across funding sources each of which has unique reporting requirements? If so, you are not alone. Most nonprofit finance teams resort to manual Excel processes and spreadsheets to make sense of their data, but this is not without its challenges:
- Federal and state grants have very specific reporting guidelines involving not only the nonprofit organization, but also the sub-recipients of the grant. Each reporting stage needs to be tracked by finance and disclosed to the public. Data accuracy is key and often suffers due to lack of suitable reporting tools.
- As charitable donations and reimbursements decline for nonprofit hospitals, the need for accurate, timely financial tracking plays an even more important role in covering costs while maintaining quality of care. To maximize what little revenue is available, finance needs reporting software that offers real-time access to income and expenditure data.
- Nonprofit colleges use a statement of financial position to detail liabilities and net assets, which can include donations tracked as either unrestricted or restricted monies. Finance often uses time consuming and potentially error-prone manual data pulls and spreadsheet formatting to produce these reports. A solution that pulls directly from multiple ERPs into existing reporting templates can streamline report creation.
How To Simplify Tracking and Reporting
How can you deliver on all these requirements when technology budgets are limited? The key is to evaluate finance-focused reporting software that can save you money by improving the accountability and efficiency of your finance team. With the right reporting and analysis solution, you can better identify and realize cost savings . Because budgets are tight and operational expenses are closely monitored, look for these specific benefits as part of your ROI assessment.
- Minimize wasted time by reducing manual reporting processes, such as tracking grant stages and by automating Excel reporting with real-time access to ERP data from multiple sources
- Speed investigation of reconciliation and integrity issues by choosing software that gives you the ability to drill into live data directly from Excel to identify and track assets such as unrestricted and restricted donation monies
- Simplify and accelerate planning processes by automating the distribution of budget forms to stakeholders for easy completion, consolidation, and approval to help streamline the collection of grant information from sub-recipients. Again, this frees up time for finance to focus on more value-added activities
With the right solution, you can maintain control and quickly address the reporting necessary on contributions, donors and expenses. Quick access to critical grant and funding data helps support financial analysis on which programs are successful or not. Nonprofit finance teams need to measure their performance on key KPIs such as:
- Donor growth year-over-year
- Donation growth
- Average gift size growth
- Donor retention rate
- Pledge fulfillment percentage
- Recurring gift percentage
- Fundraising ROI
insightsoftware solutions help you easily manage reporting for your various funding sources, stay ahead of tax and regulatory filings for your nonprofit standing, and free up time for analysis and identification of new funding sources. Improve plans for future sustainability and analyze trends with accurate, real-time data at your fingertips. To learn more about how efficiencies in tracking and reporting can benefit your nonprofit, request a free demo.
Budgeting and planning for a nonprofit can be tricky due to different income streams and compliance issues. Our infographic helps you see how prioritizing operational efficiency can grow revenue.