Curious how fund accounting software can benefit nonprofit health and community services?

We know that nonprofits are often financially constrained and rightly focus on their fiduciary responsibility to ensure any dollars they spend are going to contribute to a significant return on investment. This includes monies spent on a fund accounting software program to manage the nonprofit’s funds.

Additionally, nonprofit financial managers are considering critical business issues including how to: secure and maintain funding, financial accountability and being able to easily leverage technology (i.e. is the software program going to increase productivity, efficiency and easy to learn.) So where to start if you’re considering a change from your current accounting software program?

Questions to ask in determining the best accounting solution in the health/community services sector  might include (but not be limited to):

• Does this software have an integration of budget tools throughout the financial process?
• Can we get timely access and actionable insight from our budget data?
• Are we able to create unlimited budget scenarios to facilitate forecasting and recasting?
• Is this software specifically designed for nonprofit accounting?
• Does this software have a robust chart of accounts that gives the most flexibility in terms of defining the data collection model for an organization?
• Are the reports easy to define and produce?
• Does this software offer FASB/GASB compliance?
• Does this software enable business rules that reduce the amount of time spent on costly reconciliations?
• Are we using spreadsheets as our primary financial system with an accounting software program serving only as a primary check writing and cash management tool?
• Does our current system provide us tools for reporting at the level of granularity that our funders and grant reporting requires?

As we see the need for a more frequent level of grant reporting continuing, we know that being able to track outcomes/performance measures related to all grant fund programs will help you compete more effectively in the grants sector to garner more funds for your mission.

A good case study on the capability of MIP’s fund accounting software program in supporting grant reporting ease was a key benefit for Ozark Tri-County Health Care DBA Access Family Health Care’s CFO Sheila Long.

Under Long’s fourteen-year tenure, with the support of MIP Fund Accounting solution, their program has seen a 4-million-dollar budget grow to over 20 million. Part of this budget comes through grants and as Long notes, “Within 60 days of COVID19 we applied for a $2.4-million-dollar loan and then received $5 million in additional COVID19 grant funds. We successfully managed these grant funds and avoided any dual counting of expenditures for these funds because of MIP’s chart of accounting ease.”

As always, we’re grateful to be part of your nonprofit’s mission and our mission is to continue to serve you for your fund accounting software needs.