Lessons Learned: Balancing the Needs of Students from a Financial Perspective  

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It’s no easy feat to balance all the needs of students young-to-old. No matter your type of educational organization, you likely have a multitude of projects, programs, and services that your finance and accounting teams need to track. And you may be asking yourself, ”Is there an easy way to track multiple budgets, funding streams, programs, classrooms, and others?” 

Grab a seat and open your textbooks because class is in session, and today’s subject is fund accounting. Fund accounting, also known as nonprofit accounting, is designed to track unlimited funds and can help your educational organization manage its financial books with ease. 

Lesson 1: Fund Accounting is for All Educational Organizations 

As institutions that receive revenue from multiple sources—tuition, endowments, donations, fundraising, community donations, and grants—educational instruction benefits from having a comprehensive system for tracking funding and net tuition.  

MIP Fund Accounting® compiles and presents those funding sources in a user-friendly fashion. When managing your organization’s payroll, MIP helps you better allocate and code time and resources back to various funding sources. 

Lesson 2: Reports That Tell Your Story in Minutes 

MIP features a robust reporting editor that allows you to generate reports directly within the software in minutes without relying on third-party solutions. MIP features more than 130 report templates out-of-the-box to tell your organization’s financial story easily. Spend less time building reports and more time analyzing your data to make better financial decisions.  

USG Foundation has used MIP for several decades and loves the simple report generation.  

“I’m able to slice and dice the data any way that I need it in order to answer reports, answer questions, and provide information for management to make decisions,” said Christina Paloski, USG Foundation, Director of Finance and Operations. “It makes my life easier. I’m not having to manipulate data in order to get information to present. I truly can pull financials out of the system and then make pretty charts out of them for my board. It’s always meeting my needs.” 

Lesson 3: Fund Accounting Increases Efficiency 

MIP’s spreadsheet-less service makes your organization ready for the future. From tracking to forecasting to reporting, our all-in-one solution makes your accounting process more straightforward and streamlined. And with our robust module set, we’re ready to grow as you grow. Streamline your technology stack and increase efficiency. 

According to a recent survey of 400 education and nonprofit professionals, nearly half of them used six digital tools, and 23% relied on eight digital tools to achieve their goals. These siloed systems resulted in professionals spending at least a quarter of their day managing information between multiple systems.   

As a result, efficiency is suffering. Only 33% of professionals said their current use of systems is very efficient, despite 36% saying systems management is essential to achieving their organization’s mission.    

Inefficient solutions cost time. The time spent navigating between separate systems is roughly 10 hours a week or 520 hours a year. What could you do with an extra 520 hours a year?   

Lesson 4: Fund Accounting Solutions are Customized for Education  

MIP is the only fund accounting software built for education and nonprofits. For more than 40 years, we’ve been the fund accounting solution of choice for educational organizations across the U.S.  

CenClear Child Services has used MIP Fund Accounting since 2002. They’ve gained greater reporting flexibility, the ability to tailor their General Ledger, and the use of scalable modules that continue to support them as they grow.  

MIP features full grant and donor management integration. 

For example, MIP has a robust chart of accounts that allows your organization to present its financial data any way it wants—by program, classroom, grant, funding source, donations, or fundraisers, among many others.    

With the importance of ensuring those grants are going to the appropriate places, you need a fund accounting solution that does that with the click of a button. Our robust grant reporting software will put your leadership at ease as you ensure your organization appropriately allocates every grant. 

Pop Quiz 

Will your educational organization benefit from a complete fund accounting solution? Yes! With 40 years of experience, MIP Fund Accounting is the nation’s leading nonprofit, cloud-based SaaS fund accounting software that manages multiple funds and helps educational organizations accomplish their missions. 

Ready to level up the accounting for your educational organization? Contact us. MIP is for all educational organizations, not just schools.