Your nonprofit is up against its fair share of challenges. As the CFO, the pressures of generating revenue, managing complex budgets, improving productivity and doing more with less fall squarely on you. Add in staffing difficulties and inadequate enterprise applications, and the struggle to stay afloat (much less get ahead) can feel overwhelming.
Whether it’s QuickBooks or another legacy software, you’ve stretched your financial system to the limit. You’re trying to make do with manual workarounds and spreadsheets, compensating for the lack of capabilities needed to support an organization of your size. It can feel like a losing battle trying to wrangle outdated technology to address challenges like a nonprofit giving crisis, fundraising complexities and new stakeholder demands for transparency.
But, there’s a solution within reach. A modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform can help you expand your team’s capabilities and reimagine your operations so your organization can flourish. Here’s how a cloud ERP can help you tackle nonprofit challenges, and tips for making the case for cloud ERP and selecting the right system.
If your organization is growing, your current financial software may not be up to the task, especially if your team is contending with extensive manual processes, disjointed systems and a lack of insight into data and reports.
Implement modern cloud-based financials that easily scale with your diverse accounting and reporting needs.
Many nonprofit CFOs struggle with extensive manual processes for financial management, including data entry, reporting and reconciliation. As your organization expands, these gaps widen, hindering your ability to adapt and flourish in a rapidly changing environment.
For Room to Read, a nonprofit focused on literacy and gender equality, switching to a cloud-based technology stack was pivotal to support its expanding programs. “Our new systems gave us the confidence, control, automation and visibility we needed to achieve a successful transition to our new organizational structure,” says Room to Read CFO Shari Freedman.
By investing in Sage Intacct, a cloud-based ERP system, and replacing its Excel-based budgeting spreadsheets, Room to Read could restructure its finance and accounting function, plan and test budgeting assumptions for new programs and drive organizational growth.
In nonprofit financial management, survival depends on flexibility. Thriving depends on driving sustainable growth.
A nonprofit giving crisis is causing fluctuating donations and uncertain funding. To offset your losses, you must closely monitor your financial data and track your donations and spending at a granular level. But spreadsheets and legacy systems fall short in providing this visibility, making it difficult to see giving and spending across events, programs and donors.
Cloud financials can equip your nonprofit to manage donations and spending with precision. With centralized control and distributed responsibility built into one system, you can get real-time insights, effectively track donations and expenditures across various dimensions and support a timely and accurate financial close.
During a giving crisis, you may battle cash flow challenges, budget forecasting adjustments and heightened donor scrutiny, amplifying the strain on already limited resources. These challenges underscore the need for extensive internal controls and a financial system that can offer timely data at your fingertips.
Modern cloud ERPs are more cost-effective than legacy systems and deliver real-time data and improved forecasting tools, helping you make more informed decisions and reallocate resources to support vital programs and operations. A cloud ERP also accelerates your financial close process with standardized accounting processes and automated tasks, so you don’t waste time or resources. When you embrace modern cloud financials, you can better equip your nonprofit to survive a donation drought — without compromising your mission.
For Gateway School, an independent, nonprofit day school, turning to cloud-based financials was necessary to improve its financial operations and ability to adapt quickly to an uncertain future. “Without access to timely financials, [we were] essentially flying blind,” says Gateway CFO Shawn Padilla, sharing that their lack of timely financial reporting was “creating opportunities for poor decision-making and potential for fraud.”
By modernizing its accounting systems and processes, Gateway dramatically improved its financial operations, regulated its financial reporting cycle and gained greater scalability and continuity across its 20-person team.
In a giving crisis, nonprofit survival depends on careful data monitoring. Thriving depends on harnessing data for informed decisions.
Juggling diverse funding sources, intricate reporting requirements and varying donor expectations makes fund management and reporting difficult.
Deploy a comprehensive ERP that can quickly adapt to your diverse needs, from revenue recognition to regulatory compliance and reporting.
Your multiple funding sources — donations, grants, sponsorships, etc. — require you to manage diverse fundraising channels, maintain numerous donor relationships, track complex reporting requirements and ensure transparency.
By switching to a modern cloud solution, you can automate manual reporting tasks and get detailed insights for informed decision-making. Plus, tools that can separately track general and restricted funding ensure accurate resource allocation and compliance with donor requirements.
Investing in modern cloud financials enables you to build and maintain better relationships with donors, provide customized results and reports that meet each funder’s requirements, and make informed decisions to secure ongoing support. For example, The Koret Foundation transformed its financial and operational technology ecosystem to get better data insights and enhance its fund management.
“Under the new systems, data isn't just data; it's a valuable commodity,” says Koret Foundation CFO Marlena Wong. “Now, we find ourselves asking questions — ‘How can I make this better? Is this necessary?' — that ultimately lead to process improvements across the board. That means better, smarter grantmaking that helps us get funds to where they need to be, quicker and more transparently.”
For nonprofit finance, survival depends on addressing diverse funding needs. Thriving depends on improving fund management to track data, control costs and get a clear financial picture.
Nonprofits face increasingly stringent standards for reporting and transparent operations.
The right financial infrastructure provides real-time data access, vast reporting and analytics capabilities and detailed insights to strengthen decision-making. This boosts financial transparency and donor trust.
On top of the unrelenting pressure to acquire and maintain funding sources, you must demonstrate accountability like never before. Ensuring continued operations is on your shoulders, as is sustaining your nonprofit’s data privacy and cybersecurity. And with increasing transparency requirements, you must keep transparency top of mind or risk losing donors’ support.
The game has also changed for internal reporting. Nonprofit boards, often composed of executives from various disciplines, now expect you to produce the same caliber of reporting and analysis they see in their for-profit worlds.
By investing in modern cloud financials, you can simplify reporting processes to easily meet these stringent requirements. And, you can customize reports to meet unique board requests, like specific breakdowns on program usage, progress on event timelines or cash flow drill-downs. With automated workflows and real-time updates, you and your team can immediately access reports, registrations, metrics and analytics, allowing you to make strategic decisions faster and maintain precise communication with your stakeholders.
Advanced reporting and analytics also make it simpler to showcase your nonprofit’s results. This helps you stand out in a saturated market and attract donors who value transparency and impact measurement.
Strengthening cybersecurity and data privacy is also crucial for earning trust. A modern ERP keeps your sensitive data safe with encryption, access and audit controls and approval workflows. It also improves security through centralized data management, consistent updates and frequent ease-of-use enhancements, giving confidence to your team and stakeholders that protecting data is your priority.
In nonprofit reporting, survival depends on prioritizing transparency, accountability and trust. Thriving depends on building credibility with stakeholders.
Nonprofit IT budgets are lean, technical expertise isn’t always available in-house, and financial management software can sometimes seem like a distracting and risky headache.
Cloud-based financial management helps your organization take advantage of the same functionality, performance, security and infrastructure that major corporations use.
In the nonprofit world, accounting and financial management can sometimes slip down the priority list. It’s not always easy to allocate budget dollars to back-office infrastructure that doesn’t directly support your mission. And even though investing in modern cloud-based financials is key to running a nonprofit today, your board still needs to buy in.
To help build a credible and achievable business case for implementing modern cloud-based financials, use this three-step process:
Most organizations find that they can fully recoup the cost of a cloud-based ERP implementation within two to five years through reduced time and cost savings. (This tried-and-true ROI calculator from Nucleus Research can help you estimate your ROI.)
Selecting an ERP from the sea of cloud business applications can seem overwhelming, but these five simple considerations can help you quickly narrow down your potential candidates.
If you’re still suffering with manual tasks and inadequate technology, it may be time to consider a modern cloud ERP. And you don’t have to navigate the transition alone. Our award-winning software experts know your many challenges and have helped hundreds of nonprofits like yours make the leap to modern financials. Explore our 21-Step ERP Selection Guide and learn more about how our ERP consultants can help you evaluate your requirements and map a seamless shift to a cloud ERP.
Don’t let declining donations/grants hinder your mission. Contact our nonprofit industry experts to streamline your operations and convert funding into dynamic community transformations.
