Tag Archive: "nonprofit accounting"
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Whole Organization Budgeting: A Collaborative Approach for Nonprofits
A thoughtfully crafted budget is a blueprint for accomplishing your mission and program priorities. It does very little good if, once it is created, it disappears into your accounting system never again to be discussed with program leaders.
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The Nonprofit “CFO and” Syndrome: Strength or Symptom?
The key to identifying the right blend of skills, training, and experience for your financial leader starts with aligning the role you are seeking to the needs of your nonprofit. If the core needs of your organization expand across finance to HR, IT, facilities, and operations, then first consider whether one person should be responsible for all of these functions.
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Elegant Nonprofit Reporting: System Design
Taking the time to design an elegant chart of accounts, cost centers, and allocations creates the conditions in which your accounting system will eventually bear fruit – reports and dashboards rich with information that effectively tell your nonprofit’s financial story.
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Managing Execution Risk: From Vision to Reality in Nonprofit Finance
From CLA’s Stacey Johnson: Whether running for office, or running an organization, where people rely on us for executing a mission, our decisions matter. How we make those decisions requires a strong team, which often includes bringing trusted consultants into our corner for both expertise and experience.
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Financial Leadership in the Face of Impossible Choices
Financial leadership during times like these requires an unflinching look at your current fiscal state and a willingness to seek and share solutions across your whole organization. Holding true to your mission will guide you towards thoughtful, compassionate, and effective decisions in the midst of hardship. To help, we are offering you a few simple financial tools and some creative approaches to navigate otherwise impossible choices.
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Elegant Reporting in Nonprofit Accounting
The whole point of designing an elegant accounting system is to produce elegant reports – useful, cogent information to help us make decisions, inspire our staff, build trust among our stakeholders, and align our use of resources to meet our mission goals.
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What’s the Right Price for Nonprofit Mission?
Presenting a line-item budget to a potential funder is the equivalent of pricing the work at cost. It reduces the value of the work and the important mission it represents to time and materials. The danger of representing a nonprofit financial story this way is that we too often do an incomplete job of capturing the true costs associated with the work.
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Elegant Allocations in Nonprofit Accounting
The point of taking the time to design an elegant accounting system is not only simplicity, it is power – decision-making power. For nonprofits, we strengthen our decision making when we can see the whole truth about our programs and their finances.
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Nonprofits, Choose Your Auditors Well
Choosing the right auditors is one of the most important decisions a nonprofit and its financial leaders must make.
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Elegant Cost Centers
To build toward financial elegance, start with the broadest view of your organization and work inward. All nonprofits have a mission and a corresponding mission statement. The way your organization goes about its work, and the financial systems it sets up to support its work, should flow directly from that mission.