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Blogs

Posts covering best practices, trends, and insights.

Xyntax Vs Sage Intacct for First Nations

Many First Nation organizations start with software such as Xyxntax, Quickbooks & Sage 50 for there basic accounting needs. As a First Nation organization grows and expands, they are often forced to add new systems that are not integrated to their accounting software, this results in duplicate data entry and higher risk for human error.

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Leveraging Technology & The Cloud

Historically, it is easy to see how technology has been adopted and how it has fundamentally changed a lot of key business practices around us. From the first commercial use of technology in an 1890 United States census (Source) to the mass adoption of Steve Job’s iPhone, technology has always pushed the limits of what is considered possible and opened our eyes to further opportunities. Today, that same sentiment still exists.

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Battling the pandemic on the Cloud

Running a business is never easy. When dealing with a global health concern, this difficulty rapidly expands and forces many business owners to adapt in order to survive. We have seen many changes made by business owners and have helped many others transition towards a system which allows organizations to become more efficient – even in such trying times.

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Taking your Organization's Pulse - Measuring What Matters

Let’s face it -- accounting information is almost completely useless unless you have the reporting tools to help you measure what really matters to your non-profit organization. This applies to all non-profits; from educational institutions, faith-based and ministry organizations, to health and human services agencies. How can the executive directors or management possibly understand the complexity of their overall operations and make sound decisions without good reporting?

We are in an age of increasing demand for transparency/accountability and are looking for ways to generate and demonstrate successful outcomes. We must have simple, easy to understand metrics that can quickly take the pulse of an organization and assist with decision-making.  We must have metrics reporting that never loses focus on what is important and what truly matters to management and stakeholders.

A modern, non-profit accounting solution will consistently track your data by key components and give you instant insight, empowering you to proactively manage funding, programs, students, members, and more. These systems can provide access to both financial and statistical data that allow you to automatically calculate key metrics to measure what matters. These metrics can report on critical information such as financial (revenue), statistical (students), or any number of combinations (donations per attendee).  Sage Intacct is such a software solution that was designed to provide real-time visibility into all components of your organization. 

As management of a non-profit organization, consider the potential immediate and long-term value to your organization of real-time & accurate reporting. Think about the benefits of being able to easily generate and clearly demonstrate successful outcomes to all stakeholders including funders, board members, or donors. How could you improve the health of your organization by having real-time visibility into funding, programs, donations, expenses and more?

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Smarter way for non-profit budgeting

A Smarter way for Non-Profit Organizations to Plan and Budget

Let’s face it -- spreadsheets are not automation. They can help with some calculation, but they can cause more headaches than they solve. To achieve organizational goals, you need financial budgeting and planning that’s effective, collaborative, and strategic, but many organizations don’t have the solution to work that way; instead, they’re trapped by time-consuming, error-prone, unsecured spreadsheets. The general rule is that if you have been using a spreadsheet for more than a year there is a 100% chance that there is an error in it somewhere.  So why do so many organizations continue to use them? Maybe it’s time to look at real budgeting and planning tools that are easy-to-use, powerful, and built for smaller businesses and organizations.

Imagine a budgeting world where you have control; where everyone works on the same current version; and where all changes are tracked. Think about the time savings that could be realized with collaboration and secure access to detailed information by all managers and department heads involved in the planning process. Imagine a dashboard that gives you all the critical information you need at a glance.

These systems are available.  They’re not that complicated, and they can easily pay for themselves within one budgeting cycle. Say goodbye to outdated and dangerous spreadsheet budgets and plans and move to a smarter way to budget. Freeing ourselves and our managers from the time-consuming tasks associated with spreadsheet budgets to focus on the more important strategic planning and management decisions may be the smartest decision we make.

Look at some of the options available and decide for yourself it they are a smarter way to budget:

Sage Non-Profit Financials/Budgets Click Here

Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning Click Here

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Is Continuous Budgeting the Answer?

Budgeting is one of the most stressful times for all non-profit organizations and for-profit companies. This is usually annual process where management of each department must set their expenditures for the full year. Many times, the whole process of budgeting can take more than 3 months, waste a significant amount of management time and result in questionable budget amounts at best. Is Continuous budgeting the answer?

Continuous budgeting is the process of continually adding one more month to the end of a multi-period budget as each month goes by. This approach has the advantage of having management constantly reviewing the current month actuals amounts and then budgeting for the same month out one year. This incremental approach allows you to focus on only one month at a time instead of a whole year. The management is always looking forward instead of the rear-view mirror with historical financials. The downside of this approach is that it requires management to think about the future once a month, which may also be a good thing depending on how you look at things. If an organization uses participative budgeting to create its budgets on a continuous basis, then the total employee time used over the course of a year is substantial without the use of budgeting technology.

Continuous budgeting removes some of the rigidity and provides quicker reactions to changing conditions from the typical annual budgets. They may also reduce the amount of year end budget spending frenzy that is common with annual department budgeting (Spend it or loose it mentality). The new budgeting and planning solutions currently available can make the implementation of a continuous budgeting process much easier and reduce the annual stress of preparing the budget for the full year. By focusing on the organizations goals, one month at a time and using real-time current financial information, the accuracy should also greatly improve. Maybe its time for you and your organization to consider available solutions?

Check out our presentation on Thursday, January 15th on Budgeting and Planning.  Click Here for more information and to register for this complimentary event.  

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Non-Profit Budgeting - Let's Get Real

Spending less than you bring in is often cited as the most important non-profit finance goal. It helps you stay out of debt, save for emergencies and stash money away for future projects. It is the primary control that enables you to achieve some level of financial long-term stability. Many governments seem to forget this very basic fact. They don’t think that financial dead ends like what has happened in Greece can happen to them. Non-profits don’t have the luxury of continuous deficit spending; therefore, budgeting is essential to meet the objective of the organization. Budgets are simply the roadmaps to achieve strategic non-profit goals.

But, how do we make this whole process easier? How do we reduce the 5 major budgeting issues?

  1. Reducing the decentralized data and department silos of information
  2. Controlling the preparation process, multiple revisions and related backup information
  3. Reducing the time to prepare the budgets (complete process can take more than 3 months to complete and approve)
  4. Improving the accuracy of the information with consistent documentation
  5. Improving the timeliness of the budget (Produce the budgets frequently enough to help decision making to help focus on strategic goals)

The answer to these questions is through using technology effectively in our organizations. Spreadsheets are not automation. Let’s get real and understand that they are only a tool. There are solutions available that can take the prior history from your accounting system and send it to the appropriate department manager. The information is in a format that they can use to easily create a new budget. This budget has all the related documentation available and linked to details for the budget information. The budget can then be rolled up into other levels, like divisions and organizations. With this setup, changes are easy to make, all being tracked and the approved budget can be quickly linked with your accounting system to provide timely reporting and improved decision making. These budgeting and planning systems can solve all the major budgeting issues and are very inexpensive to implement within organizations.  (For more info Click Here)

So, let’s get real and understand that the current budget processes are a pain and result in significant amounts of wasted time and effort. Let’s use the existing technology, accounting and management processes to make our budgeting less stressful.

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