Best Practices for Nonprofits: Automate Your Processes
As nonprofits, your business focuses 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.
Metrics
It’s pretty clear from funder prioritization and requirements that monitoring, measuring and sharing key metrics are critical. If you want to ensure high program efficiency metrics and reduced overhead costs, you need efficient automation processes in place.
Automated Workflows
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 with instant access to reports.
Audits
Audits can be costly and time consuming. 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 so you can save on travel, delays, and costs.
Start to define, track, and measure results so that you can quickly identify your savings and efficiency gains. Get familiar with the technology tools available to help you increase stewardship while decreasing costs. Check out this resource when you start to look for a modern application to help you automate your processes: Checklist: Essential Features of a Modern Accounting System for Nonprofit Organizations.
Be sure to learn more about how Intacct helps nonprofit organizations, and register to attend an upcoming Intacct informational webinar, “Not Your Mother’s Chart of Accounts: Modern Day Nonprofit Accounting Applications,” on Thursday, March 5, 2015 at 11:00am PST.
