As a non-profit organization, serving the needs of others is your top priority. But if you are like most non-profits, your organization’s mission is often hampered by administrative concerns such as budgeting constraints and staffing issues.
While you want to spend most of your time handling grassroots work and making a difference in your community, the board and investors want to make sure you are handling your funds and budget correctly.Â
Zobrio can help your organization reach its goals by providing advanced assistance regarding fund accounting and budgeting software solutions. To learn how we can help solve your fund accounting and budgeting challenges, call our office or reach out to our team online today.
Why is budgeting and fund accounting a challenge for non-profits?
Just because a business is labeled a non-profit, that doesn’t take away the need for a sound budget and accurate fund accounting. Here are some challenges that non-profits often face.
Sources of income
Issues arise with the sources of income. Much of a non-profit’s budget and cash flow is based on grants and donations, some of it restricted for certain projects or funds.
All of these funding streams and budget sources can be difficult to keep track of, especially for nonprofits that don’t have a dedicated fund accounting team.
Unstable revenue cycles
Another issue is the instability in many non-profit organizations’ revenue cycles. That makes it difficult to create accurate budgets. Therefore, non-profits need to react quickly when donations or grants are awarded or when the organization is injected with an unforeseen source of income.
No financial experts on staff
Many non-profits don’t have any accountants or financial professionals on staff, leaving budgeting and fund accounting to staff that is untrained in the financial sector.
No Time
Many non-profits consist of a small staff with individuals taking on multiple responsibilities. Because budgeting and fund accounting requires an eye for meticulous detail, a staff that is already stressed for time won’t be able to put in the commitment needed for quality financial work.
Fortunately, these challenges can be solved by teaming with Zobrio — the technology and business strategy experts for nonprofits and government agencies.Â
How Zobrio can help your non-profit solve its budgeting and fund accounting challenges
At Zobrio, our team takes pride in understanding your processes and future needs. After learning everything about your non-profit organization during a detailed consultation, we offer a unique plan to improve your budgeting and fund accounting management. Here are some of our solutions:
Providing the latest fund accounting software
Often, fund accounting software is confusing and not user-friendly. That’s not the case with Zobrio’s software solutions.
The cutting-edge software we provide creates process and workflow automation, saving your team time and stress. Plus, we take the time to fully understand your workflow so that your fund accounting software functions perfectly, complementing your processes. Here is how the right fund accounting software can help:
Simplify
Our fund accounting software eliminates the need for multiple spreadsheets and files. No longer will your team have to consolidate spreadsheets, eliminating costly data entry errors.
Standardize
When you standardize your processes with the right fund accounting software, you limit errors and streamline your workload. Standardized processes make it easier to train new employees and reduce the time spent on manual data entry.
Automate
Today’s fund accounting software offers several automated features, allowing your team to spend more time serving the needs of the community.
Automated Cash Management and Bank Reconciliation: ZAI Banking
Zobrio Actionable Intelligence (ZAI) Banking takes care of all of your bank reconciliation and cash management needs. ZAI Banking lets you easily track every dollar in and out of your office and create a complete audit trail that follows the path of every transaction and automatically reconciles receipts in seconds, even across multiple bank accounts. ZAI Banking helps you reduce errors, provides one-click reconciliation and helps reduce fraud.
How does ZAI Banking help your non-profit:
- Completely simplifies the audit process
- Automatic one-click bank reconciliation makes the reconciliation process painless and hands-free
- No matter how many bank accounts your organization uses, ZAI Banking elegantly adapts to any cash-flow system
- Easily take credit-card payments online or in person to offer your donors convenient payment options
- Seamlessly integrates with many existing financial software
- Cloud-based solution provides anytime, anywhere convenient and secure access
Simplified Budgeting Improves Budgeting, Financial Statements and Financial Planning Cycles: ZAI Budgeting
ZAI Budgeting is an intuitive, easy-to-use platform that is easy to learn, which supports excellent user adoption. ZAI Budgeting allows your managers to confidently review and input their budgetary data without the need for strong financial or system skills.
Here are some ways ZAI Budgeting streamlines and automates your budgetary process
- Allow managers to easily input their budget and forecasts and eliminates time-consuming duplication of data entry
- Sophisticated system administration capabilities allow the finance team to establish user access by business unit, department or cost item
- Automatically consolidates the budget/forecast across the entire organization
- Multi-dimensional slicing-and-dicing, drill-down and easy Excel interface supports easy exploration and understanding of budgetary data
- Allows the official budget along with all amendments to be integrated to your financial system
- Full audit compliance with line-by-line transaction detail providing a comprehensive audit trail and highly detailed and thorough work papers.
Get help with budgeting and fund accounting today
You don’t have to keep putting up with manual data entry errors and costly budgeting mistakes when help is available. Zobrio has teamed with dozens of non-profits from around the country to serve their fund accounting and budgeting software needs.Â