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Your organization’s budget and how it incorporates your long-term goals are crucial to show how you accomplish your mission.
Nonprofit growth is complex. When preparing for a new year, you’re setting new fundraising numbers, applying for and managing grants, finding new donors, and adjusting where that funding is going. As you prepare for a new year, your budget shows the steps needed to accomplish those goals and recognize new growth.
MIP’s Budget module makes everything budget-related simple. The module allows your team to easily create, forecast, and report on your organization’s budget. It also lets you create multiple budgets—such as original, revised, operating, capital, multi-year, and hypothetical—and compare them in reports with data visualization to share with your board and stakeholders. Plus, you can effortlessly enforce budget controls with a single click and activate warnings when you’re at risk of overspending.
MIP’s budget module helps your organization:
- Control costs and streamline the budget process
- Save time by using the modification tool for entering budget adjustments or revised budget figures
- Produce detailed financial reports for management and your board of directors for more accurate forecasting and budget analysis
- Gain a holistic view of your organization’s finances, allowing you to quickly identify gaps or surpluses so you can efficiently manage resources
- Use options for coding
- Base new budgets off prior budgets with the same historical timeframe periods
- Feature up to two comparative columns
- Utilize automatic budget settings
- Mass update multiple transactions at a time
“I use MIP Fund Accounting to manage the finances of a multi-county library system. I use the system for the whole cycle of business operations, from budgeting to operating to reporting. The system is designed for organizations like mine, so it is easy to track and report on various grants and other special-purpose funding that we receive,” said Kimberly S., of Coastal Plain Regional Library System
The MIP Knowledgebase has several resources for customers to access whenever they need help. Some of the most popular resources around budgeting include:
- How to set up new budget versions
- How to copy budgets from current posted budget
- How to copy a budget from Microsoft Excel into MIP
Let’s further explore the capabilities of MIP’s budget module:
How to Use Budget Controls
Budget controls are essential. They enable the system to automatically check budget balances during transaction posting and limit users to the remaining budget when making a transaction entry.
What are Budget Controls?
- Allows your accounting system to check budget balances during transaction posting
- Limits the number of users to be able to only use the available amount budgeted for transaction entry
Why would I use Budget Controls?
- Lets users check budget balances during transaction entry
- Prevents overspending and fraud
- Warns or prevent users from posting over budget transactions
- Ensures funding is not overspent
- Internal Control tool that helps prevents fraud and flag anomalies
Within the budget module, you can also check when documents are submitted before you purchase an item. This allows your organization to review its budget during the procurement process.
The Microix Budget Module offers greater functionality if you want to enhance MIP’s budgeting features. Microix enhances MIP’s core budgeting processes and adds in elements like:
- Routing completed worksheets through a multi-level approval process
- Budgeting payroll positions along with benefits
- Approving worksheets from any device
How to Use Budget Versions
MIP comes with two budget versions preformatted: original and revised. The module then allows for an unlimited amount of user-created budget versions to create and track different budget scenarios. Your organization can use these budget versions to show “what we planned” versus “what we are now planning.”
How budget versions work:
1. You create your first budget using the Original version, which some organizations call a “preliminary version.”
2. You make a copy of that budget as the starting point for your revised version—the original and revised versions will be identical at this point.
3. You change your budget into the revised version while MIP keeps the original intact.
4. You can then create budget versions like: forecasts, board budgets, and grant versions.
You can easily track budgets over multiple years, base budgets off previous budgets over the same historical timeframe periods, check the budget at any time in dashboards, and create executive-view users—that allow you to control who in your organization can establish, view, and report on budgets.
How to Use Budget Worksheets
MIP’s budget worksheets work much like Microsoft Excel and come loaded with tools to create budgets for multiple scenarios and periods. Let the software do the work, creating the budget work-in-progress. Use quick adjustment features during the budget period to modify as needed with many mass update functions available.
The budget worksheets will then create budget transactions for your organization over the entire budget period you established. You can filter these transactions later to show the areas your organization wants to monitor. You can easily import/export these worksheets into Microsoft Excel to allow for collaborative budget development.
Reporting on Budgets
MIP allows your organization to tell its financial story. You can easily create reports unique to your organization with our report editor featuring over 150 out-of-the-box dynamic report templates to convey the information you’re looking for quickly.
With MIP Cloud, you can easily create dashboards to monitor your budget at-a-glance. MIP’s DrillPoint module adds a deeper reporting dimension through a direct MIP integration. If you are always exporting your reports to MIP to format the data or need more advanced reporting, DrillPoint allows you to drill down into your MIP data right from within Excel
MIP Budget Training Opportunities
In addition, to the Knowledgebase, we have several resources dedicated to learning more about using MIP’s budget capabilities for on-premise and cloud deployments.
Are you looking to add additional budget or reporting modules such as DrillPoint or Microix? Request a demo today.
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