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Non-Profit and NGO Financial Solutions

How ERP Helps Leading Non-Profits

Your non-profit organization must demonstrate the impact of donations and funding, and this is difficult to do with an inadequate or outdated accounting system. Vision33 solves common non-profit challenges with the right technology.

A solid enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution integrates with other best-of-breed solutions and makes it easy to share data. With a modern user interface, flexibility, customization options, advanced core financials, and focused industry features, ERP empowers your mission fulfillment.

 

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A solid ERP system offers unmatched visibility and automation for non-profits, even across multiple entities. The ERP systems offered by Vision33 power thousands of non-profit organizations, including:

  • Member associations
  • Healthcare and behavioral health
  • NGOs
  • Human services
  • Foundations and philanthropic charities
  • Faith-based and Catholic Dioceses
  • Environment and animal-related
  • Community improvement
  • Arts, culture, and humanities
  • Education

Challenges

When your organization must demonstrate the impact of donations and funding, your financial management tools significantly affect your mission success. A solid ERP system streamlines grant, fund, project, and donor accounting, delivers real-time visibility into critical metrics, and provides detailed insights that empower your team on your mission. 

Non-profits gain connectivity, visibility, automation, agility, and efficiency to maximize impact and enable strategic growth.

By combining data from across your entire organization, ERP ensures you know how you’re performing so you can stay ahead of the curve while delivering results for your stakeholders.

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A robust ERP system offers seamless accounting for non-profit organizations by integrating and automating critical functions, including:

  • Financial reporting and dashboards
  • Organizational and compliance reporting
  • Accounting processes
  • Procurement
  • Month-end close
  • Consolidations
  • Allocations
  • Grant management
  • Time and expenses
  • Project management
  • Data from third-party apps

Four Critical NonProfit Organizations

Real-time visibility and integration

Your technology should provide a complete picture of your business—which is impossible if you use multiple software tools. Your solution must fit your non-profit's size, function and mission, and seamlessly integrate with your other operational-critical applications.

You also need real-time data, visibility, and insights so decision-makers can get fast answers to critical questions and make informed decisions. Your financial reporting needs are constantly evolving, and stakeholders want different metrics at different times. Grant and funding requirements shift with the competitive landscape. As your organization shifts and expands, so will the metrics and insights that matter for growth.

Knowing what to improve and where to invest requires an agile, flexible ERP system that can quickly slice and dice details, dive deep with custom reports or dashboards, and seamlessly connect data from across your business.

Timely and accurate data and reporting

Multiple systems and processes, changing requirements, and manual consolidations result in long timeframes for closes, financial reporting, and operational analyses. Manual compliance, grant, and contract reporting are time-consuming and delay results and billing. 

Without the right system, it’s difficult to automate and streamline accounting and financial processes and access real-time information. Your finance team is always in the weeds with Excel files and deadlines, and by the time reports are completed, they’re already out of date.

Time may be your most critical resource, and a more efficient system means fewer spreadsheets and more time to focus on accomplishing your mission.

Identifying how to do more with less

With older, traditional accounting systems, access to organizational insights is determined by hard-coded individual accounts. To track new dimensional values (e.g., location, department, project, and service), you must create new accounts, which is time-consuming and inflexible. A solid ERP system allows you to easily add and change dimensions to give your data context.

You need to analyze real-time performance from every angle without managing a complex chart of accounts. It’s a significant advantage for non-profits to have an ERP system that facilitates budgeting by user-defined dimensions instead of general ledger (GL). ERP enables you to create reports in real-time, formatted exactly how you need them.

If you need to add dimensional information to your operational data, budgets, or transactions, ERP makes it easy to add, change, or track performance drivers for fast answers to critical questions.

Multi-entity management

Basic accounting systems can’t manage finances for multiple entities. When you have separate systems for each entity (e.g., regions, countries, project teams, and global currencies), consolidation is time-intensive, error-prone, ineffective, and unscalable.

Managing non-profit finances with basic accounting like QuickBooks, FreshBooks, spreadsheets, and manual effort is unsustainable. You need automated currency conversion, inter-entity transactions, and local tax reporting to close the books faster. A solid ERP system delivers continuous consolidation, access to real-time data, and the ability to drill down into a single entity or transaction, then seamlessly click back to your consolidated view.

Without a solution designed for multi-entity non-profits, the challenges of managing your entities and global consolidations will diminish your impact and prevent growth. But with a platform that meets your needs, you can shrink your monthly close time by 40-80%.

Benefits

The Benefits of Sage Intacct for Nonprofit Organizations

The right ERP system offers cloud-based deployment, to reduce hardware and security concerns, and financial management with workflow automation and native third-party integrations designed to meet non-profit organizations’ needs. The ERP systems offered by Vision33 power thousands of non-profit organizations including:

  • Member associations
  • Internationally focused NGOs
  • Foundations
  • Philanthropic charities
  • Faith-based organizations
  • Healthcare and human services providers
  • Environmentally focused organizations
  • Animal-related organizations
  • Community improvement providers
  • Education, arts, and culture NPOs

By combining smooth operational workflows with greater financial visibility, you can connect your operations on a single, efficient platform that scales with your growth.

With the solutions offered by Vision33, growing non-profit organizations can:

Features

Sage Intacct offers industry-leading core financials, user-friendly reporting and dashboards, and advanced functionality tailor-made for nonprofits. Intacct’s cloud-based platform revolves around a high-powered general ledger with dimension-level tracking for all your transactions, giving you expanded reporting powers while simultaneously shrinking your total number of GL accounts.By automating tasks related to grant, fund, project, and donor accounting, Sage Intacct empowers your finance team to do more strategizing and less paperwork.

Features include:

Centralize data across organizational apps. 

Seamlessly connect your CRM system, industry tools, or other software applications to your ERP solution for a single, integrated system.

Track project finances. 

Break budgets down by any metric (e.g., project, phase, task, and resource). Compare actual project budget to planned budget and monitor real-time project progress and financials.

Optimize resources. 

Get instant visibility into KPIs, revenue, and daily operations. Use improved insights and real-time dashboard reporting to make strategic decisions about allocating time and resources.

Adapt faster. 

Get fast answers to crucial performance questions and respond to changing environments. Reports that took months to complete are now available in minutes.

Streamline operations. 

Eliminate manual accounting tasks with automated workflows, real-time dashboards, and focused non-profit sector functionality.

Automate consolidations. 

Shave days or weeks off your monthly close time with multi-entity management. Never wait for month-end to get up-to-date, consolidated financial information.

Maximize impact. 

Use dimensional accounting to track and filter metrics. Slice and dice data to identify your impact by multiple dimensions (e.g., project, department, client, and service type). Operate more efficiently and stay focused on the value-add priorities that drive mission fulfillment.

Take the Next Step

Let's Discuss Your Business Challenges

Take the next step by exploring our product information gallery full of brochures, videos, and more to learn about the different ERP systems Vision33 offers.

You can also browse our success stories to see what our customers have to say about how ERP has helped them run simple, grow fast, and drive profit.

Then let’s discuss your non-profit organization’s growth challenges and which ERP system will help you reach the next milestone in your mission. Vision33 provides the right balance of software and consulting to maximize non-profit organizations’ investment in transformative enterprise technologies. Contact us to chat with a certified Vision33 consultant about your financial management needs.

 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

  • Does this software consolidate my non-profit's finances into one location?

    Yes—and consolidations are automated. You’ll shave days or weeks off your monthly close time with multi-entity management and will never have to wait for month-end to get up-to-date, consolidated financial information.

  • How is Sage Intacct different from traditional accounting systems for non-profits?

    Unlike traditional accounting software, Sage Intacct offers specialized accounting, tracking, and reporting functionality perfect for non-profits.

    Its multi-dimensional, multi-ledger system easily captures granular financial and operational data exactly how you manage your non-profit. Whether you want to see which funds were used for each project, how your organization is performing by location or team, or the expense associated with each volunteer or employee, Sage Intacct gives you the immediate visibility you need.

  • Can I easily share dashboards and reporting with my team members?

    Yes. Self-service, customizable reports and dashboards with anytime, anywhere access can be shared with anyone with permission.

  • How does Sage Intacct automate my non-profit's most important tasks?

    The cloud-native platform revolves around a high-powered general ledger with dimension-level tracking for all your transactions. This gives you expanded reporting powers while shrinking your total number of GL accounts. By automating grant, fund, project, and donor accounting tasks, Sage Intacct empowers your finance team to do more strategizing and less paperwork.