If you’re at least somewhat struggling with the budgeting and planning process at your growing nonprofit, then chances are you didn’t stumble upon this article accidentally. If your organization hasn’t yet migrated to a full-scale Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) tool, then you’re probably either using the deficient integrated budgeting tool that came with your ERP system, doing it fully in Excel, or a combination of both. While the native budgeting applications offered through your ERP system, or even using Excel, can bridge the gap for a while, it’s not going to hold all the water once your organization grows to a certain point.
Excel and native ERP budgeting tools might be slowing you down in a number of ways. Any combination of the following issues can create an inefficient, unnecessarily long, and confusing budgeting process:
- Difficulty collaborating with staff
- Lack of formal workflow/approvals
- Manual template updates with the latest actuals from your General Ledger (GL)
- Manual creation or lack of reports and analytics
- Overwritten calculations and formulas
If you’re struggling with any of these issues at your organization, JMT has a solution for nonprofits just like yours! We have been working with third-party FP&A solutions for decades now, and Vena checks all of the boxes for a growing nonprofit. Vena excels in a number of areas for nonprofits, including:
Automating your Grant and Shared Cost Allocations. Vena provides flexible and powerful allocation logic to streamline potentially time-consuming and manual Excel-based processes enabling real-time allocations of costs.
Seamlessly integrating with countless GL, HRIS, Donor Management/CRM software, and more. Vena is an open platform that can function as a secure warehouse for your data from numerous on-premise and Cloud-based software. There are numerous pre-built integrations to many popular software options, such as Intacct and Salesforce, and essentially any on-premise software can schedule an extract or run a report that can be loaded directly into Vena with a couple of mouse clicks.
Powerful workflow and approval functionality for use across growing teams. Managing numerous Excel files and versions of the truth across growing teams of finance and programmatic staff creates significant risks and inefficiencies in the budget process. Vena includes a robust market-leading workflow tool that enables a detailed audit trail of changes by staff and user-friendly access anywhere there is an internet connection.
Multi-version capabilities for what-if scenario planning. The reality for a nonprofit today is that things can change…quickly. Vena provides agile contingency planning to evaluate what forecasted funding and variable costs are on the horizon to enable timely and educated business decisions.
A single holistic view of your organization across both financial and nonfinancial metrics to better enable analytics on constituents served and impact towards your mission. Easily run reports or create dashboards for your stakeholders to provide real-time visibility into the successes of your organization.
Offering a tremendously flexible and scalable product that is currently leveraged by billion-dollar (with a B) corporations. JMT provides competitive and cost-effective pricing to enable nonprofits to gain access to this powerful software that you won’t outgrow. In addition, we lock in pricing for three years so there are no surprises when it comes time to renew.
If you’re struggling with the budgeting and planning process at your nonprofit, we’d love the opportunity to learn more about your FP&A needs and help you improve automation, system integration, workflow and approval processes, and increase strategic planning for your organization. To chat with one of our nonprofit experts, contact us here.
Brendan Sohan
Sr. Client Account Manager, JMT Consulting
Brendan has been with JMT for 9 years, working with both existing and new clients using MIP Fund Accounting. Brendan’s daily goal is to ensure that all of his clients are getting the most out of their systems as possible.
