Ace nonprofit education financial management with cloud accounting software

Whether you support schools and colleges, libraries, research facilities, or other nonprofit education organizations, utilizing modern cloud accounting software will help you keep your organization’s financials GAAP compliant and audit-ready.

Cloud nonprofit accounting solutions like Sage Intacct deliver the big picture across all of the entities in your organization so you can make informed, proactive decisions. It will also help you improve stewardship and provide transparency that makes the grade with your donors and funders. More and more education-focused nonprofits are moving their financial management to the cloud, and it is easy to see why:

• Cloud architecture provides a world-class foundation for accounting and finance and reduces IT infrastructure costs and complexity.
• Staff and volunteers enjoy anytime, anywhere access to the software, increasing finance department productivity by 30% or more.
• Multi-entity education organizations gain the advantage of continuous consolidation across all entities.
• Finance leaders can support programs and entities onsite or remotely.
• Open API integration makes it easy to exchange data between the accounting system and other best-in-class apps (CRM, donor management, fundraising, payroll, etc.) for a more complete view of your organization.

There are many ways that organizations benefit from cloud nonprofit accounting software, but these three areas are especially critical for education organizations:

• Real-time visibility and reporting
• Compliance and accountability
• Stewardship

Discover how nonprofit education finance leaders are using Sage Intacct to answer hard financial questions across all their education programs.

Gain real-time visibility into financial health and outcomes

To make the greatest impact for your mission, you need visibility into both financial performance and program outcomes. You need a clear view of what is happening right now — not what happened last month. Where are program expenses against budget? What is the status of funding and what funds are restricted? What student outcomes are being achieved?

Cloud nonprofit accounting software provides real-time visibility along with easy and configurable reporting. A dimensional chart of accounts and point-and-click filtering for more than 150 standard reports mean you can drill down to the smallest detail or benefit from a holistic, actionable view of your entire mission. With Sage Intacct, you can create tailored dashboards and reports relevant to your organization’s specific mission and operational measures. Real-time dashboards can blend financial and statistical data to give you a view of financial performance alongside operational outcomes.

“With Sage Intacct, MSTA now has a reliable view into every aspect of its business, including its growing non-dues revenue stream, specific opportunities for cost savings, and unpaid receivables. In fact, this visibility helped the organization reduce outstanding receivables by about two-thirds!”

Melissa Lorts, Finance Director, Missouri State Teacher’s Association (MSTA)

Not only does Sage Intacct deliver enhanced visibility, access, and alignment with shared chart of accounts, report formats, vendor lists, and more, it also provides continuous consolidation across all of your education entities, locations, and programs. Role-based dashboards allow everyone to see what’s most important to their job. For example, directors of each entity would view charts, KPIs and reports at the entity level while board members and executives might study both entity-level and consolidated reporting.

“Our fund visibility has been drastically improved because of Sage Intacct’s multi-entity, multi-dimensional architecture. With the many dimensions available within Sage Intacct, we are able to easily keep track of each fund’s separate cash or accounts payable balance or roll up all our funds to look at the foundation’s overall portfolio.”

Jodie Mote, Controller & Treasurer, UAB Educational Foundation

Ensure compliance and improve accountability

Taking nonprofit financial management to the cloud helps ensure your organization’s compliance with accounting standards. With Sage Intacct, your organization’s financials remain GAAP compliant and audit-ready at all times. Nonprofit-specific reports and FASB and IRS-compliant financial statements will streamline your compliance efforts, while audit trails, role-based access, and other security features strengthen internal controls.

“Our CEO and board of directors have recognized how valuable Sage Intacct’s real-time dashboards are to the organization because they increase our credibility and help executives better manage day-to-day operations. Rather than creating dozens of different reports for various departments, we can get the right information to the right groups by putting top-level reports on a dashboard, and letting the appropriate staff or volunteers adjust filters to see whatever region, department, or sub-cost centers they care about.”

Dave Teske, Director of Finance, Association of College Unions International (ACUI)

Regular audits provide insight into financial health and reassure donors of your stewardship. Using cloud accounting software can enable your auditor to work remotely if they choose to and it will also streamline the accounting process, potentially lowering the cost of your audit. Starting with the financial statement, your auditor can click on any figure and drill all the way down to the general and sub-ledgers, reports, reconciliations, and original transactions to test key accounting processes. Auditors are also able to run built-in reports and reconciliations on demand.

Beyond external compliance, having real-time visibility, automated reporting, and role-based dashboards empowers greater internal accountability throughout the organization. Everyone —from program managers to the board of directors — has access to up-to-date information that will help them make the right decisions to further the mission.

“Sage Intacct has been the perfect solution for our needs, and the mindset across our organization has completely changed since we made the switch. Now everyone has visibility into their spending and knows immediately if their budget starts to go negative, so there’s real ownership by department managers.”

Roberta Hopkinds, CFO, Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School

Demonstrate stewardship and strengthen collaboration

Cloud accounting software enables education organizations to provide transparency and reporting that demonstrates stewardship to donors. Sage Intacct maximizes stewardship by automating grant, fund, and donor accounting as well as billing processes. Finance teams can help ensure grant renewals by achieving mission success and providing timely, accurate reporting to donors. Additionally, the ability to show donors reports that highlight both financial performance (stewardship) and outcome metrics (mission impact) allows you to tell your organization’s story more effectively.

“We receive almost $100 million in U.S. government grants and contracts and manage the related projects in Sage Intacct to report accurate, timely data back to our donors, which increases their trust in our organization. We can compare costs for the fall, spring, and summer terms and track how each semester is going or monitor individual projects to make mission-critical decisions about program spending daily. We know when to close or extend a project and can see early on if we’ll need to ask donors for more funds or for a revision of a project’s scope.”

Kote Lomidze, Chief Financial & Administrative Officer, World Learning

Sage Intacct’s open API facilitates easy, seamless integration with other critical business applications, such as CRMs (like Salesforce) or online giving, for greater efficiency and smart decision-making. When everyone can share the same data, collaboration improves and you can bridge the gap between finance and development.

“In many nonprofits, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the development team and the finance team because they’re each counting things differently. With Sage Intacct’s seamless connection to Salesforce, that whole conversation and frustration has evaporated. We’re always in sync because both teams work off the same accurate data.”

lliah Mohamed, Director Accounting & Financial Operations, DonorsChoose

Conclusion

When nonprofit schools, colleges, libraries, research institutes, associations, and other education organizations graduate to cloud accounting software, they can streamline accounting and finance, improve management insight, and strengthen cross-departmental collaboration. The result is faster, more informed decision-making that helps drive successful mission impact.

Learn more about how cloud nonprofit accounting software for education organizations can improve real-time financial visibility, internal accountability, and stewardship. Download our eBook, Benefits of Cloud Accounting Software for Education Nonprofit Organizations.