Budgeting and Reporting Software for Not for Profit
Budgeting and reporting software within a not-for-profit organizations can accelerate reporting and budgeting cycles. Learn the importance of a good budget and how software can aid your organization.
The importance of a good budget
When used as a tool for strategic planning, a budget enables you to do the following:
- Coordinate operations around both short and long-term goals.
- Fine-tune your operational strategy.
- Make informed decisions.
- Conduct more productive board meetings.
- Provide better direction to your nonprofit finance committee.
- Improve fundraising efforts with better-informed donors.
- Easily monitor the use of mixed-purpose funds.
- Make the best use of your funds overall.
- Stay on track financially.
Several types of budget approaches
There are many different budget models that can be adopted by not-for-profit organisations.
Some approaches are:
- Zero Based Budgeting (ZBB) – start from scratch each year and justify expenditure.
- Incremental budgeting – start with previous years budget or forecast and increment. Typically this requires the least resource to create.
- Surplus budgets – plan for a surplus to invest in future years when times are tough.
- Deficit budgets – not a standard approach but may be required in a growth or time of change.
- Break even budgets, - identifies funding and targets each part of an organisation to work to a set limit.
All these approaches can be modelled as well as monitored within Corporate Planner to give a single source of truth.
How Corporate Planner can help
Corporate Planner is a budgeting tool which can model all the financial assumptions for an organization. Whereas Excel often produces static and single scenario models which require considerable amounts of time to develop each year. Corporate Planner saves time and resources by providing:
- Single model for budgets, forecasts, and actual data with multiple scenarios.
- Monthly management reports.
- Simple budget and forecast templates.
- Dynamic I&E, Balance Sheet, and Cash flow models.
- Multiuser collaborative planning platform (no longer collect and aggregate multiple budget holder spreadsheets).
- Multiyear planning, provide historic data and budgets as well as forecast 1 or more years ahead.
Balance Sheet and Cash flow forecasting
Cash flow can be highly volatile within not-for-profit organizations with grants, donations and other revenue perhaps not being distributed evenly throughout a year. It is important to model both revenue and expense assumptions and to predict any short falls in cash. With Corporate Planner Finance, model in detail, debtors, creditors, investments and financing. I&E, Balance Sheet and Cash flow are fully integrated so that any change in assumptions, from budget holders, immediately update the overall plan.
Multiple Scenarios for different stakeholders
With Corporate Planner you can create multiple scenarios e.g. bank budgets, management budgets and department budgets each with different performance targets. Rapidly analyse variances to budgets and forecasts in the single financial model. Use the scenarios for best and worst case so that you are prepared for all eventualities.
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