Accounting in 2025: Efficient, Responsive, Successful

accounting in 2025 blog post

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Reading Time: 3 minutes

As 2024 ends, it’s time to reflect on your organization’s accomplishments and prepare for another year. 

While the year certainly had its challenges, it also saw nonprofits proactively responding to challenges around sustainability. From examining operational processes to improving drivers of mission success, nonprofit organizations are innovating to be more efficient and responsive.  How your organization starts 2025 sets the tone of the year and positions your organization for sustained success. To get a kickstart on 2025, we’ll explore the trends and topics that will define the year and discuss how nonprofits can be innovators in the new year.

The Topics Defining 2025

Preparing for Economic Uncertainty

Revenues and donations are shrinking, and nonprofits nationwide are scrambling to find new funding streams and explore new revenue opportunities.  In this uncertain economic climate, it’s more important than ever for nonprofits to think creatively and strategically about their fundraising efforts.

Despite modest increases in large donor numbers in the second quarter of 2024, nonprofit organizations are seeing decreases in small donors and donor retention. According to Philanthropy, as we move into the new year, questions about the economy’s strength remain.

When it comes to planning for uncertainty, nonprofit leaders should look back at what’s worked before and come up with various scenarios for how the year could unfold, create separate plans and budgets for your most optimistic year, a slightly scaled-back year, and a plan that accounts for decreased revenues and donations.


As the year progresses, be prepared to pivot to one of the other scenarios if your actuals aren’t meeting your projections, and don’t be afraid to try something new. The 2025 Fundraising Giving Calendar offers several themes, important dates, and ideas to shake up your organization’s fundraising plans.


Trying new ways to reach existing donors and find new donors can help your nonprofit create new revenue sources, but that’s just a piece of the puzzle, on the operations side, a pivotal step to overcoming uncertainty touches on another theme for the year: improving efficiency.

Improving Operational Efficiency

Despite the uncertainty, nonprofits remain resilient. While three out of four nonprofits had concerns about sustainability in a recent study, the overwhelming majority of organizations were optimistic that optimizing operations could cull those concerns.


When considering your 2025 projections, take a holistic view of your organization and examine if intradepartmental barriers contribute to inefficiency. For example, research shows nonprofit employees spend 30% of the day managing data between systems.


Organizations commonly use separate systems for accounting and fundraising, creating an intradepartmental barrier. Even if unintentional, a barrier between these departments limits visibility into nonprofit operations and can contribute to errors with manual data entry.

Breaking down these barriers will be critical to overcoming uncertainty and having proper visibility into nonprofit health.

Robert Parkinson, CFO at Paterson, N.J.-based Turning Point, broke down a barrier in his organization by unifying his organization’s fundraising and accounting software.

“Any money that we don’t have to spend on extra administrative costs, extra systems, and even extra time can be dollars spent toward fulfilling the needs of our community,” Parkinson said. “We’re replacing time-consuming spreadsheets, calculations, and back and forth across people and teams with GiveSmart and MIP, the automation of data and transactions frees us up and is going to save us time and money that can go back into our treatment programs.”


As Parkinson demonstrates, breaking down this barrier increases efficiency by strategically unifying data, eliminating manual entry, streamlining reporting workflows, and aligning each department toward your organization’s most significant goal: accomplishing its mission.

Still, the final piece of the puzzle is to embrace new technology.

Streamlined AI Tools

While nonprofit hesitancy around AI tools remains high, there’s no doubt AI will stay at the forefront of the tech world in 2025.

Nonprofits are beginning to embrace AI. Forty-one percent of nonprofits agree that AI would greatly benefit operations, and 36% of organizations believe it would also impact fundraising strategies.

AI can decrease administrative work while assisting with things like brainstorming new fundraising ideas, writing content templates to thank supporters, and summarizing important statistics in an easy-to-communicate format. As with any AI tool, always use the information provided as a starting point, not the final product.

Even if you’re not jumping fully into AI, take a moment to explore some of the free AI tools nonprofits can use and investigate how they could impact your workday.

What happens in 2025 is yet to be seen; preparing to pivot and target operational inefficiency, we’ll put the puzzle pieces together and make 2025 your best year to date.

New Year Nonprofit Resources

This collection of resources further explores ways your nonprofit can increase operational efficiency in 2025:


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