Add Processes to Improve Nonprofit Operational Efficiencies

Nonprofit Financial Management for Improved Performance by Adding Process Roadmaps

How many times have you started on a project or a task only to have that sense of déjà vu? Perhaps you had to perform that task last year, or a similar task last month. Unless you documented how you went about performing this task, however, it’s unlikely that you’ll remember the exact steps. That leads to duplicate efforts and re-creating the same task over and over again. In other words, you end up reinventing the wheel.

Many nonprofits fall into this trap simply because they are under-staffed. Their current staff is busy completing their assigned task lists, thinking ahead to next month, serving constituents, and doing all of the myriad tasks it takes to keep a healthy nonprofit organization humming along. It can be difficult to carve out time to draft a process roadmap, and still even more difficult to develop a plan to store such roadmaps and transmit them to others during the employee onboarding process. Still, without such roadmaps in place, valuable time is wasted. Nonprofit financial management can improve operational efficiencies by creating a process roadmap.

What Is a Process Roadmap?

Roadmaps are going the way of the telephone book, but they still provide a good analogy for documents around the office. A process roadmap maps out the path from start to finish that you take in order to complete a task. It includes vital information such as who performs which task in the process, what resources may be needed, and when the task should be completed.

Such a document need not be lengthy or cumbersome. In fact, the simpler and easier it is to read and understand, the better. Some companies require process documents to be one page or less to ensure they are as simple as can be.

Once a process is documented, it can then be replicated by anyone in the organization or delegated to someone outside of the organization. It is a great time saver after the initial time is invested into creating the document.

Uses of Process Maps for Nonprofit Financial Management

Let’s take a look at two common tasks nonprofits face and how process roadmaps can help:

  1. Annual charity event: Many nonprofits hold annual fund-raising events such as golf tournaments, sales, open houses, and the like. These events are frequently process-driven and require that multiple people pitch in and ready things for the date of the event. The date is usually set far in advance, so that a timeline can be easily mapped out from the event date back to the first tasks in the process, such as securing the venue. When a process map is in place for an annual event, it can be delegated to multiple staff members, volunteers, or outsourced partners.
  2. Audits: An annual financial audit is another event that can be transformed with a basic process in place and mapped out. You know when the audit will take place, and which documents must be gathered for the auditors. Specific resources may need to be earmarked for the auditing process, such as conference rooms reserved, personnel available, files organized and so on. Once a process is mapped and in place, the audit can go smoothly each year if the process is followed.

Organizing Your Processes

The most efficient way to organize processes is to create a template. The template can include:

  1. Name of the process
  2. Date when the draft was created
  3. A brief explanation of the process
  4. Goals and outcomes
  5. Timeline and deadlines
  6. Materials or other things needed
  7. Step by step instructions, tagged with the role assigned to each step.
  8. List of resources

A shared network drive or cloud-based system such as Google Docs, free to use with a standard (and free) Google account, makes it easy to organize all of your processes and provide access to staff at any given time.

Include Training

Lastly, be sure to include some basic training once the processes are in place. A process can only be used if it’s efficient and if people are aware it exists. Training familiarizes everyone with the steps in the process and provides a valuable opportunity for feedback to adjust the process.

Having your most important projects and events mapped out using a process roadmap saves you a great deal of time and effort. It enables you to transfer knowledge to new employees or volunteers and to smoothly and successfully navigate the path yet again. It is a great tool for organizational efficiency.

Beck & Company

Beck & Company is an independent certified public accounting firm located in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1987, we specialize in the world of nonprofit financial management, helping you to navigate the complex world of finance and accounting. Our services are always personalized, and cost-effective for your institution. We welcome your inquiry or call.  Contact us today or call 703-834-0776 x 8001.

Outsourcing to Boost Operational Efficiencies

“You can’t be everything to everyone.”

Have you heard that saying? It’s an old proverb that has a deep ring of truth to it.

Many people try to cut corners and save money by doing everything themselves. Sooner or later, however, you realize that you can’t do everything well. By trying to be everything to everybody, you fail to be the best you can be in one specialty area. Your organization can suffer as a result.

Nonprofits often suffer from this problem. Founders try to handle their marketing, fundraising, and operations, as well as the mission of the nonprofit. Faced with ever-increasing duties, burnout is common as too many tasks pack into the same 24 hours. And since you can’t be great at everything you set your hand to in a given day, something, somewhere, has to give.

The Flip Side: Hiring Too Many People

Faced with such a dilemma, many nonprofits turn instead to hiring people to fill specialized roles. They hire someone to handle fundraising, and someone else to manage grants. Before long, they have many employees, but now feel the pinch of not enough cash because it’s all going to salaries. While they’re getting more work done, efficiencies suffer as organizations become staff-heavy.

What’s a nonprofit manager to do?

Outsourcing for Operational Efficiencies

Outsourcing is a great option for nonprofits to improve operational efficiencies. In today’s virtual, digital world, you can outsource almost any role at your nonprofit. Of course, the actual work that you do may be hands-on; visiting nurses must still care for patients, teachers must teach, and an animal shelter has animals that need to be fed. But many other roles, like communications, marketing, fundraising, and even accounting can be outsourced.

Outsourcing improves operational efficiencies by:

  • Reducing overhead and staff redundancies.
  • Finding and working with highly experienced specialists in their respective disciplines.
  • Offering flexibility so that you can tap into expertise when you need it, rather than hiring someone full time.
  • Providing access to top talent without the expense and time of recruiting, hiring, and training.

Outsourcing provides you with the flexibility to find and work with the best people in the nonprofit world. It also frees up your time so that you can focus on what’s critical to your organization.

Everyone’s core strengths are different. When you can work solely with your own strengths and outsource other tasks to someone else, your entire organization benefits. Not only is your time better spent on what you do well, but you can tap into a wealth of information and experience when you outsource specialized tasks.

Finding the Right Outsourcing Partner

Once you’ve made up your mind to find a company to outsource work to, it’s time to make some phone calls or emails. You can find potential vendors through a variety of channels.

  • Ask other nonprofits for recommendations. Many are happy to help out a fellow organization by recommending great companies, consultants, or individuals to you.
  • Review trade association memberships. Many associations include fine companies that provide outsourced services to nonprofits.
  • Search online. Be sure to read testimonials, case studies, and other third-party reviews of the organization.

Evaluate several companies so that you have an apples-to-apples comparison of their experience, approach, and other critical information about how they work and how they approach their projects.

Outsourcing is a great option for finding experienced professionals to help you with tasks that aren’t your strong suit. It can save time as well as add value to your organization. Whether you outsource fundraising, grant writing, or accounting, finding a great outsourcing partner is a step in the right direction.

Measure Your Results

How do you know that your nonprofit is working efficiently? Measure your outcomes. Leading nonprofits use outcome measures to demonstrate success to donors and stakeholders. Learn more about specific outcome metrics for nonprofits at this free webinar, Outcome Measures: Metrics that Matter for Nonprofits held Friday, September 16 at 2 PM ET.

Beck & Company

Established in 1987, Beck & Company is a CPA firm serving the Washington, D.C. and Eastern Seaboard area. Our services are personalized to your organization’s needs. We provide independent auditing, accounting, tax services, and consulting to help keep your organization’s finances running smoothly. Fund accounting is just one of our many specialties. Contact us today or call 703-834-0776

Operational Efficiencies and Achieving Your Mission: The Hidden Link

The business side of nonprofit management sometimes gets short shrift among those actively working to achieve your nonprofit’s mission. Those working on the front lines, or on projects directly supporting the mission, may look askance at those whose sole focus is back-office operations and organizational efficiency.

Yet those who focus on operational efficiencies and productivity in the nonprofit workplace are supporting its mission in many important ways. Without someone paying attention to operational efficiencies at a nonprofit organization, precious resources may be spent unproductively.

The Importance of Operational Efficiencies

“Achieve the mission” is usually the rallying cry of the nonprofit organization.  Your nonprofit’s mission may be tied to healthcare, education, animal rights, the arts, or helping industry professionals network. No matter what its mission, the growing need for services, combined with the rising costs of providing those services, means that every resource at your organization must be used as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Enter the office people: the folks from your accounting, finance, human resources, sales and marketing areas (if you’re lucky enough to work for a nonprofit large enough to have people dedicated to each of these areas and not wearing multiple hats). These are the people tasked with making sure that those precious resources such as donations, grant money, membership fees, dues, and fundraising monies are spent in a wise manner. They’re tasked with finding ways to improve how your organization does its much-needed work without sacrificing the quality of that work.

If it seems like a big job, it is. Fortunately, there are ways to help improve operational efficiencies without extreme measures.

Improving Operational Efficiencies: Three Tips

Although specific people in your nonprofit may be tasked with improving operational efficiencies, everyone within your organization plays an important role. The following tips may encourage everyone to find ways to work better, faster, and smarter.

  1. Share resources: Share resources, people, and time with other departments. Avoid the “silo” mentality, which forms walls or barriers around your group to keep information and resources in the group instead of sharing with the broader team. The more you can share, the more efficient your organization will be. Shared resources and talents save money by adding value or solving problems that a single person may struggle with.
  2. Embrace mobile technology: Smartphones and cloud-based business systems are two ways in which you can make it easy for your team to work wherever they are. If they’re traveling, at an event, or at home, they can still respond to inquiries, handle work, and access company information. It makes for a much more efficient system than older site-based software and resources.
  3. Reduce unnecessary travel: Take a long, hard look at your organization’s travel schedule and budget. Do you really need to attend that many trade shows, conferences and events? Face-to-face team meetings can be replaced by video conference, conference calls, or shared documents. With so many options to work easily from a distance, the need for travel should be reduced. Save travel budgets for the most important things that can only be accomplished in person, and reduce costs whenever possible in your travel by staying at inexpensive hotels, limiting meal budgets, sharing taxis, and other cost-saving measures.

Operational Efficiencies Enhanced by the Right Software

We mentioned cloud-based systems as part of operational efficiencies, and they remain an important and accessible path to improving access, communications and collaborations for nonprofits. The right software solution for your nonprofit organization can make it much easier to track expenses and income and make sure the two are balanced appropriately. Making margin enables you to fulfill your mission, and that’s important for any organization. With the right software in place, improving operational efficiencies is a lot easier.

Dive deeper into nonprofit software and attend this webinar “Not Your Mother’s Chart of Accounts—Leveraging Cloud Technology for Nonprofit Accounting.”

Beck & Company Certified Public Accountants and Business Consultants

At Beck & Company, we believe that technical experience must be matched with a service mindset for the best customer experience. We offer consulting, seminars, workshops, and accounting services for the nonprofit industry. For more information, contact us online or call 703-834-0776.

Are You Keeping Too Much Nonprofit Documentation?

4 Document Management Steps You Should Follow

Last week, we talked about the importance of document retention for nonprofit compliance, especially as it relates to donor gifts. This week, let’s take a look at the importance of purging documents and data. When your nonprofit organization is required to keep documents, it can be easy to just keep everything. Has your data storage grown exponentially over the past few years? Has your organization become a pack rat, hanging onto records and data you don’t really need? As electronic storage capacity has increased and gotten cheaper, it is much easier to hold on to information. While it may seem that the cost to store data is cheap, it can be more expensive than you think. These hidden costs are why having an Information Governance plan is so important.

The hidden costs of too much data

Information Governance encompasses document management as well as information security, compliance, business intelligence and big data. It attempts to find the balance point between extracting value from data and reducing the potential risk of data. While the cost of storage may be minimal, it can cost exponentially more if there is ever a reason to do e-discovery for legal or compliance reasons. When there is a legal action of some sort, auditors or regulators or the FBI can secure the data on an organization’s servers and workstations and sift through it all. A study by the RAND Corporation, Where the Money Goes, estimates that e-discovery costs average $18,000 per gigabyte.

4 ways to manage the risk

There are steps that you can take to minimize your risk.

  1. If you don’t need it, delete it. Yes, this can take time, but every piece of unneeded information not only costs money to store, but it is a liability. Think of all of those emails in your inbox that also have attached documents.
  2. Purge unnecessary email and information. You are liable for constituent and customer data. If a customer is subject to legal action that requires e-discovery, and you have received related customer data, your systems are open for discovery as well.
  3. Classify information. You should classify all information that you are storing. For example, if an email string is discussing sensitive organizational data such as constituent personal information, that email should be clearly marked as confidential. This is legal protection.
  4. Make document management policies and follow them. It can be easy to ignore the document archiving process—the task is complete and you move on. However, creating a document management strategy is important for your long-term success, efficiency and compliance.

One way to gain valuable wisdom in matters that impact your organization is to contact Beck & Company Certified Public Accountants and Business Advisors. We want to use our many years of professional expertise to help your organization succeed. Contact us today for more information about our nonprofit services. We can assist you in implementing policies that save you money and let you focus on your mission.