Take control of your income

When every pound counts: How to stop losing income and start driving impact.

Picture the scene: A house is on fire and the alarm bells sound. A structure is fully on fire, and firefighters quickly connect their hoses to the fire engine and charge toward the flames. Water is spewing from the hasty connections, but there’s so much pressure in the system that the fire is successfully extinguished.

It would be nice if you had so much income that you could lose a few hundred here or a few thousand there and not even miss it. A nice problem to have, but not a problem that non-profits enjoy.

Protect your income

Is your nonprofit leaking money? Here's how to plug the holes.

Behind every donation, every donor gift, every grant, is the belief that you’ll be a good steward and turn that income into positive change. When those funds are lost to inefficiency, unnecessary license fees, and organizational inertia, it’s harder to reach your potential and your fundraisers have to do more work to make up the shortfall. There’s an easier way to take control of your income: seamlessly link your impact to your income and donors in a single system. All the way from sub-grantees, straight back to donors, without the endless spreadsheets and manual work.

Why siloed software is costing you more than you think

The market is flooded with software applications built by well-meaning developers and designed to address specific charitable use cases. Their license fees are probably low cost, and their feature sets are narrowly defined. Maybe you have one app for soliciting grants, another CRM app to track individual donors, another application for event planning, an online portal to your bank, a spreadsheet on a server tracking AP, and yet another application to handling impact measurement and reporting sitting separately from your finance system. Sound familiar?

How do those applications share information? Were they designed to share at all, or is the financial data they contain siloed from the other applications? How many people do you need to process the output of one of those applications and enter that output into another system? What does all of that processing cost?

We know one thing for sure: those costs are lost and not doing anything to advance your mission.

Book Your 15-Minute Consultation

What are the benefits?

Why smart nonprofits are replacing spreadsheets with strategy.

The ability to surface financial information quickly and easily changes how a charity is run. Board meetings are more productive, targeted fundraising efforts are easier to create, and queries from potential new funders and regulators are answered quickly.

Planning: Just as important is the ability to use your financial data on the fly for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to streamline operations and maximise efficiencies. Ideally, you can predict and share with donors the impact from more funding. But that also requires systems to at least talk to each other.

Visibility: Ideally, your financial and impact data will be managed from a single pool. And that data would include information about your donors, fundraising opportunities, available funds, disbursements, impact, inventory, with a single system to help you make sense of it all wherever and whenever you need to.

Accuracy: Removing the potential for data entry and data transfer errors as well as the costs to maintain legacy systems is just a start to regaining control of your income. Think of the hours you’ve spent wrestling with applications that simply weren’t designed to deal with today’s business realities, or the late nights spent coaxing and finessing a report for the next day’s board meeting.

Manageability: Next, remove the IT maintenance costs for your on-prem applications in favour of a fully-managed cloud solution. No more worry about upgrades or backups. Now you can redirect those costs too.

What’s next?

We’ve already saved your organisation a lot of money, and we’re just getting started. Ready to stop wasting funds and start scaling your impact? In our next article, we’ll show you exactly how NetSuite helps nonprofits like yours do more with less, Many Happy Returns: The NetSuite Advantage for Charities .