A special breed of nonprofits, Community Action Agencies are the primary source of direct support for the more the 34.5 million people living in poverty in the United States. Community Action Agencies and Head Start Programs serve more than 16 million individuals and more than 3 million families every year.

While exhibiting at the Annual Community Action Partnership Conference in Austin, Texas last fall, we had the chance to speak to a lot of CAP leaders. Of the dozens of agency leaders we spoke with during the conference, we found a common theme among them all. Because the majority of the dollars for the programs that agencies run come from government grant funding, they are faced with unique financial management challenges—from onerous government reporting requirements to complex allocation rules.  After all, the goal of the CAP is to ensure they a) get consistent funding and b) funding is spent on programs and services that support the community, not their organizational overhead.

However, there are some big roadblocks that keep community action agencies from that goal. Many CAP and other nonprofit organizations struggle to take the pain out of the reporting process. The main problem is a lack of visibility into what’s going on in the organization due to common grant management problems:

• Manually tracking and reporting on financial and operational results using spreadsheets.
• Under/over spending grants due to risk around employment of reasonable and consistent methods for cost allocations.
• Inefficient time spent to produce financial reports including not only compliance and funder reports but also strategically valuable decision support information for organization management.

If you’re a nonprofit struggling with grant management, what’s the solution? Ultimately, you need to either optimize your financial management solution or implement a new one. And that begins with finding the right partner to help you through the process.

Because JMT Consulting is an independent company and not a software publisher, we are able to help organizations like these determine and implement the best modern financial management solutions for their organizations. And because of our extensive work with CAP and Head Start agencies, JMT Consulting is able to provide your organization services too. 

Here’s how we do it:

Evaluation

We carefully evaluate your current systems and processes, reporting requirements, and other compliance needs. Then, we identify the right tools to meet the specific and unique goals of your organization.

Acquisition and implementation

To achieve automation objectives, we help you choose and implement the tools that will help you succeed.

Ongoing training and support

We don’t stop at implementation. To ensure the tools and the teams using them are optimized for success, we continue working with you far beyond day one with your new system.

We’ve enjoyed helping CAP organizations such as East Bay Community Action Partnership and Comprehensive Community Action Partnership achieve their goals and want to continue that work for many more community action agencies.

To get started, download this ebook to help walk you through the tools and processes your organization needs for successful financial management.