Depending on when your year-end close occurs, you may be in the thick of budget planning for the new year. Managers scramble to assess expenses and project revenues while accountants field question after question. Meanwhile, finding the historic year-over-year projections in Excel and sharing them with all of the managers requires multiple meetings to review documents and ensure a complete understanding of the information. It’s an exhausting time for nonprofit accountants – and it doesn’t have to be that way.
EMK provides AccuFund implementation, training, and ongoing support. Since 1993, we’ve helped a wide range of nonprofit clients transform their approach to the budgeting process and overall accounting with AccuFund. Once you’ve experienced using this powerful software to prepare your budgets, you’ll look with amazement at the time saved when using a fund accounting program.
Five Ways in Which AccuFund Helps with the Budgeting Process
1. Centralized access: Budgets can be cumbersome when everyone in an organization must review, update, and adjust the same document. Although centralized spreadsheets hosted on cloud servers help with this challenge, they also open up the spreadsheets to mistakes as multiple people, some with less familiarity with the spreadsheet program than others, enter information or create formulas. AccuFund provides every stakeholder with the ability to enter data, produce reports, and view information, without the risk of making mistakes in formulas or clicking the wrong thing and accidentally changing numbers.
2. Data presentation: AccuFund offers reports that are easy for managers from all departments to understand. You do not need a degree in accounting to grasp the nuances of budgeting with these understandable reports. Accounting and finance professionals can answer in-depth questions instead of spending hours reviewing basic reports with managers.
3. Historical data: Past information on expenses, revenues, grants, endowments, and more are all available within the system. Spreadsheets may require multiple files which must be reconciled to provide a complete picture of past performance.
4. Review A/P and A/R: Budgeting requires a solid understanding of current payables and receivables. With AccuFund, you can call this information up on the dashboard with a click of the mouse. Updating both A/R and A/P is easy when you can enter everything in one place.
5. Sample budgets: Prepare a sample budget for board approval. Then, after the changes are made, provide the board with both previous and amended budgets. It’s easy to show the before and after with AccuFund.
Other Tips for an Easier Budgeting Process
Although each nonprofit is unique, there are some standard tricks of the trade that nonprofit accountants use to make the budgeting process more manageable.
- Determine if zero-based or historic budgeting practices will be used.
- Teach non-managers what zero or historic budgeting means, and what it looks like to them.
- Communicate the urgency of completing budgeting tasks with your entire staff.
- Set and communicate firm deadlines throughout the budgeting process.
- Meet one-on-one with department managers and offer group meetings for others who may be involved in the budget process to answer questions, review last year’s reports, and discuss significant changes such as the new FASB reporting requirements if they impact this year’s budgeting process for your management team.
- Gather and share historical data, including reports, proactively to assist with budgeting.
AccuFund offers the resources your organization needs to build budgets, share data and information, and prepare accurate and timely reports. EMK offers implementation, training, and ongoing support. AccuFund makes the entire budgeting process easier and more reliable than ever before.
Choose EMK for AccuFund Implementation
Since 1993, EMK Inc. has helped nonprofits and government agencies with their accounting software choices and implementation. We install AccuFund financial software and ongoing support to nonprofits, endowments, government agencies, and others seeking software that’s built to work with how nonprofits manage their money. For more information or to speak with someone about AccuFund, call EMK Inc. at 888-443-9399 or contact us.