The Sage Intacct Spin: Key Ratios and Percentages that Nonprofit Board Members Should Know

• August 23, 2018
• Kathy Jastrzebski

Have you read CLA’s article on the Five Key Ratios and Percentages that Nonprofit Board Members Should Know? If not, hop over there and then come back here.

It was a great article, right? Incredibly helpful information in an easy to grasp, quick post. You might however wonder: can I build these ratios in Intacct? We already know you can certainly display KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) on dashboards (even printing the dashboard too – check out the Elevate Your Dashboards post for more dashboard examples!). Your initial instinct may be to fall back on Excel, it’s easy to fall back on after all, but not today. Today, we’ll walk you through how to build two of these in Intacct so you can take the steps and apply them to your very own company. Let’s begin!

Months of Cash aka “survival time”

As Daniel states in the article “Committees often need to know if your organization has enough cash to cover expenses over a certain period of time. The months of cash figure gives a quick snapshot of your organization’s “survival time,” were it to lose future funding or become unable to generate short-term revenue.

Months of cash is calculated in two steps: first, by figuring your total expenses by month (total expenses divided by 12), then dividing your total cash by that monthly figure. Ideally, you should have three to six months of cash on hand, meaning you could operate that long in a funding crisis.”

Let’s build it in Intacct:

Step 1: Create Account Group for All Expenses

Helpful Tip: Always build account groups using ranges (dynamic groups). This will ensure when you add new accounts, the accounts are automatically included in the group.

Step 2: Create Computational Account Group for Total Expenses by Month (Step 1 divided by 12)

Step 3: Create Account Group for Total Cash

Step 4: Create Computational Account Group for Total Cash Divided by Expenses/Month (Step 3 divided by Step 2)

Step 5: Add the KPI to a Dashboard

Current Ratio aka “the ability to pay off short-term obligations”

Again, to quote Daniel, “To calculate the current ratio, divide current assets by current liabilities. It is always good to be in the positive, but a truly good ratio is 2-to-1, which means that you have twice as much in current assets as current obligations (liabilities). This figure is more important than the basic cash figure because it shows what you have on hand after accounting for all liabilities.”

Let’s build it in Intacct:

Step 1: Create Account Group for Current Assets

Step 2: Create Account Group for Current Liabilities

Step 3: Create Computational Account Group for Current Assets Divided by Current Liabilities

Step 4: Add the KPI to a Dashboard

Notice a pattern?

Step 1: Create the necessary groups of gl accounts

Step 2: Create the computations

Step 3: Add them to dashboards

That’s it. Three main steps to create any KPI in Intacct.

What’s next?

Need help conceptualizing, planning, or building your Intacct dashboards? Reach out to us here! Watch this CLA Talk on Data Visualization and why it’s important here!

Tags: Dashboard, Dashboards, Key Performance Indicators, Nonprofit, General Ledger, Reporting | 1 Comment »