Why You Need Accounting Software for your NGO

Accounting Software for NGO and Why You Need it

Nonprofit organizations are an amalgamation of complex accounting. Between donor management and regular maintenance, the numbers can get hopelessly jumbled when tax season comes around. 

The ramifications of poorly-executed accounting for a nonprofit can be disastrous. By investing in accounting software, you can avoid potential pitfalls and make it easier on yourself in the process. 

Here, you’ll learn all about the benefits of accounting software: boosting efficiency, maintaining consistent costs, and aiding in your nonprofit’s financial management. 

By investigating accounting software for nonprofits, you’ve taken the first step in the direction towards fiscal sustainability. Allowing you to meet your nonprofit’s goals and aid it in its mission.

Scope Impacts NGO Accounting

Because the span of an NGO can be far-reaching, the accounting needs of it are intricate. Currency exchange rates, sensitive financial information, and international banking make accounting for an NGO quite the minefield. 

From grassroots advocacy to globe-spanning organizations, money management is key.   

As such, the right cloud-based software can maintain data, keep updated information about expenses and overhead costs, while using a wide range of notable features to make itself necessary for a functioning NGO. 

Looking to maintain donor information across the globe? Evaluate the overhead of a venture based on past expense reports? Nonprofit accounting software can help. 

Best of all, this will lessen the extent that human error can affect accounting for nonprofits. NGOs that grow from a smaller size and scale up are especially vulnerable to mismanaged accounting. 

By generating financial reports, performing basic accounting functions, and even providing payment processing options, accounting software can address many common issues that can befall your NGO.

What Your NGO Can Do With The Right Accounting Software

The accounting capabilities of the right accounting software are endless. It can handle your general accounting needs, forecasting, and budgeting for you. 

When your funds come from abundant sources (grants, donations, government aid), your accounting needs will vary. Managing and distributing such funds smartly and across a vast array of expenses is made easier with dimensional accounting software.

Accounting software can generate detailed reports, financial reports, and provide a whole picture of your NGO’s accounting package in real time. 

This will allow you a more accurate awareness of your NGO’s and its affiliates financial positions, allowing for educated decisions in real time. 

Though accounting software for your NGO represents an additional cost, sometimes a great one depending on what avenue you pursue, it is a worthy expenditure. The right software can be useful, informative, and will divest you of financial headaches. 

It can aid you in the development of budgets: demonstrating ideal models for expenses and earnings. Such information can use your financial data for cost-cutting and growth in revenue. 

This can help burgeoning nonprofits work within the confines of tight budgets and demonstrate where growth occurs in larger NGOs. 

Through data-informed decisions, be it in budgeting or forecasting, your NGO is in an ideal position to maximize the usage of its funds. This will go a long way towards furthering your nonprofit’s initiatives.

Cloud-Based Accounting Worth The Upgrade

From security to accessibility, cloud-based accounting is the way of the future for lots of reasons. It provides a smaller margin of error for data storage and accessibility from different sources. 

Not to mention that cloud-based accounting will scale with your company. Providing scaling abilities allows for exponential growth that won’t be an impediment in the long run. 

This lets you plan for collaborative budget planning, letting many players view and submit data. This alleviates inconsistencies that tend to come up in messy spreadsheet managed data. 

To improve the functionality of your specific NGO, you’ll need to find the one that’s best for you. While donation management software helps with donor communication, fundraising accounting software is more useful when it comes to the monetary management side of things. 

Cloud-based accounting solutions, specifically accounting software solutions, are ideal for implementation from multiple users in different areas, facilitating the easy input and exchange of data.

Forecasting

Sound financial decisions are often made with a compendium of data. Accurate forecasting utilizes this data in correlation with trends, real-time information, and past performance to predict how a scenario will play out. 

Accounting solutions provide modeling capabilities to account for variables like scale. Additionally, it can run what-if scenarios and provide contingency options based on the forecast provided. 

These accounting tasks can be performed accurately and to your NGO’s benefit to allow for modifications and streamlined effectiveness.

Accessibility

Regardless of the current size of your nonprofit, an accounting software program will be accessed or used by several different groups over your nonprofit’s lifetime. Your accountant, financial manager, and potentially donors if you allow for online portals to facilitate donations. 

Knowing that, good accounting software is user-friendly and won’t break when too many people access it. 

Supplanting the spreadsheet, which doesn’t accommodate multiple users efficiently and allow for growth, reliable accounting software will make inputting and sharing data painless. 

Invoices

Whether you’re utilizing freelance work, managing expenses, or simply generating your own invoices, accounting software will reduce the time you spend bookkeeping so you can get back to furthering your mission. 

Working between different vendors, especially if you’re working on a grand scale, can be a headache. Between different bank accounts, customized invoices, and payment processing, invoice management can be the most time-consuming and tedious part of financial management. 

Not anymore - the right accounting software solution will streamline that, managing payment methods and communications if that’s a feature you value. 

Invest in an Accounting Solution for Success

As in the case of every critical tool, there will be a right fit. We’ve convinced you of the need for accounting software - now you need to find what’s best for you. 

Maybe you care about scope - international usage is important. The most important thing to you may be compatibility with mobile devices. Check out user reviews to see what software meets your needs. 

Regardless of what accounting features you’re looking for, accounting for nonprofits need not be complicated. With management software that allows for usability, accessibility, and easy data facilitation the change from an accounting firm (or do-it-yourself accounting) to accounting software couldn’t be an easier choice. 

Download this free Playbook for Advocacy Associations to discover more tools designed to help your nonprofit reach its goals.