We have come to our final blog in this series on nonprofit accounting best practices. Thus far, we have reviewed some key areas that we hope you’ll put into your plans as you prepare for future growth. This week’s focus is nothing short of critical to the flow and infrastructure health of your organization, automating your processes.
As nonprofits, we focus on expanding programs and services, reducing costs, increasing return on mission, and strengthening donor loyalty – all of which is good stewardship. That’s really what automation of processes is all about: doing more and creating greater impact with less.
We started this series talking about outcome measures. It’s pretty clear from funder prioritization and requirements that monitoring, measuring, and sharing key metrics are critical. But this requires efficiency and automation of processes. If you want to ensure high program efficiency metrics, you have to create the productivity savings, via automation, to reduce the proportional costs of overhead to program investment.
Here’s a specific example – let’s say you want to improve internal controls and reduce the inefficiencies of your manual purchasing system. By utilizing automated workflows in a best in class fund accounting solution, you will save time, paper, and frustration. Automated purchasing workflows will give you notification (on any device) that you have a pending electronic purchasing requisition or PO for approval. As you approve vendor payments, you can drill right into the original document to see the invoice. Payments are point and click. Reporting and visibility are instant.
Another example might be your audit. Is it taking too long and costing too much? In an automated environment, you can create a dashboard for your auditors that give them view only access to key reports and documents – right from their office. They can drill right into the source documents and you save travel, delays, and costs.
When you begin identifying your goals, priorities, and strategies, select some best practices to implement in your organization. It’s extremely helpful to define, track and measure results so that you can identify your savings and efficiency gains. Get familiar with the technology tools available to help you increase stewardship while decreasing costs.
Questions or comments regarding automating your processes? Please reach out to us. You can also follow us on Twitter (@BeckCPAs).
At Beck & Company we specialize in not-for-profit accounting and auditing. We understand the unique challenge of balancing the needs of your various stakeholders – contributors, members and your board, too. We have experience serving not-for-profit organizations such as unions, homeowner’s associations, religious organizations, charities, and social service organizations. If you have any questions regarding the filing of your form 990 we are here to help. Contact us today for more information.