Nonprofit Development, Meet Accounting! pt 1

Nonprofit organizations often enter and manage key financial data in places other than their accounting system—and require that the data flow into the general ledger.But getting the data from those systems—for managing fundraising, membership, grants, or service management—into the accounting system is rarely as straightforward as we would like it to be.In part 1 of this podcast, our experts shared our thoughts in answer to the following questions:What are the differing viewpoints or priorities of Development and Accounting when it comes to managing financial data? How can we resolve misunderstanding between Development and Accounting about how to categorize gift records? Our chart of accounts is currently very complex and confusing, which makes it very difficult to map gift records to the GL for integration. Is there a solution? Do you struggle to integrate data in your Development and Accounting systems?Many nonprofits struggle to manage the entire lifecycle of financial transactions flowing into the general ledger from other systems. All nonprofits exert too much energy and time manually manipulating financial data inside or outside of their systems, performing duplicative data entry, exporting and importing data, debugging integration tools and processes, performing reconciliations, creating and maintaining reports, and responding to auditors.While there are clearly technical challenges, often the heart of the problem is the need to reconcile the differences in requirements between departments – for example, Development and Accounting – where both have different but equally legitimate needs to view financial data in different ways.We’ve assembled a panel of three experts with more than 60 combined years of experience solving just these sorts of problems for nonprofit organizations. As they’ve worked with the World Wildlife Fund, Bread for the World, the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, the Meridian Institute, and hundreds of other organizations, they’ve picked up a few things about how to establish leadership and operational practices, business processes, data models, and technology environments that work together in solving our clients’ challenges.This webinar is appropriate for nonprofit executives, managers, accounting, development, and nonprofit IT personnel – and as with all our webinars, it is appropriate for a varied audience. _______________________________Start a conversation :)Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/email Carolyn at [email protected] LinkedIn on reddit/r/nonprofitITmanagementon the Community IT websiteThanks for listening.