The focus of your nonprofit organization will invariably be on delivering compassionate results that revolve around your core mission. However, even when profit is neither the motivation nor the company goal, a robust internal understanding of finances paired with an accurate reporting system is necessary.
Where dedicated business technology resources abound in for-profit sectors, typically, they are more scarce in small-to-mid-sized charitable organizations. An accounting solution, or enterprise resource planning system (ERP), that is designed specifically for nonprofits condenses and streamlines the disparate finance and reporting needs for greater transparency, budget accuracy, grant management—all without creating new departments or specialized roles.
Discussions around tech-backed finance and resource management for a nonprofit may initially sound counterintuitive. Accounting systems often carry bureaucratic connotations and require middle-management supervision, highly flexible budgets, and prohibitive installation costs regarding new hardware and lengthy training.
However, a customizable ERP for nonprofit organizations presents a competitive solution through budget tracking and at-a-glance reporting without the downsides of planning and implementing a patchwork of overlapping roles and data input streams from scratch.
The operational budget at your nonprofit is likely built to garner the most for your mission with conservative spending. And with ERP for nonprofit organizations, the potential savings are plentiful. In addition, they help you deliver clear data to investors, boards, and key partners. The balance will be found in leveraging these enterprise-level offerings for budget-minded organizations that require robust indicators of mission success.
As the old adage goes, “help us help you.” Wye Cares develops, implements, and delivers flexible and powerful ERP solutions for nonprofit enterprises that are seeking to maximize their resources and better extend their service delivery. ERP for nonprofits can transform the way you deliver services and manage your budgets as they evolve.
What is an ERP for Nonprofit Organizations?
An ERP system is a process management platform that helps plan and integrate the critical functions of an organization. For a nonprofit, ERPs will contain all the critical functions of the mission-driven operation into a single, centralized software.
Depending on the mission you serve, this can be related to everything from finance and fund accounting, donor management, grant management, planning, purchasing, inventory, human resources, and more.
In consolidating these business functions into one simple-to-use platform, nonprofit organizations can better direct their financial and human resources to achieve greater outreach and secure more consistent funding through benefactor confidence.
What Would the Value of an ERP Look Like for My Nonprofit?
De-emphasizing profit motive does not give these organizations any reason to be less focused on their finances. Often working with limits in the workforce, how nonprofits allocate time, energy, and finances becomes paramount. The cyclical nature of short-term and long-term projects paired with the demand for performance visibility makes for complicated efforts to consolidate and share information regarding the organization’s missions.
Let’s dive into the basics of ERP and where they might be valuable for your nonprofit organization.
The return on investment of ERP for nonprofit organizations is evident in this regard—centralizing data collection for on-demand, accurate, and easily generated reports. Compliance is built-in with fund accounting, making audits a breeze. Streamlining grant management simplifies previous complex documentation and processes. And error-prone, manual data entry and reconciliation is nearly eliminated to free up valuable administrative time that can be allocated more productively elsewhere.
Empower the roles of your grant writers, administrators, finance managers, human resource managers, fundraisers, and outreach specialists with easy-to-use tools they need from anywhere. There is no nonprofit organization too small to benefit greatly from maximizing the abilities, productivity, and contribution of their valuable resources.
ERP systems provide both visible and invisible cost savings that help your people go further in pursuing every piece of the mission. Furthermore, funds can be easily managed to ensure that your organization provides exemplary reporting while tracking multiple funding streams for projects, stationing, or contractual obligations.
Other areas where a scalable ERP solution built for nonprofit organizations can deliver value are:
- Eliminating fraud risk
- Reducing human error
- Increasing data security
- Getting real-time, accurate reporting across the organization
- Guaranteeing federal compliance
- Supporting financial transparency for donor confidence
Understanding your budget and staying on target through at-a-glance reporting offers both you and your benefactors confidence knowing your team is staying on track. Identifying where you excel and where you are falling behind is critical for any business, and doubly so for organizations that rely on transparency and efficient deployment of services to secure grants and funding.
Where Do You Start with a Nonprofit ERP?
The prospect of approaching an ERP implementation project is both daunting and intimidating for small-to-mid-sized organizations of any industry, nonprofits included. Rest assured, ERPs aren’t what they used to be—which were large, complex, on-premise systems only fit for big companies with huge IT budgets.
ERPs today are now purposely designed for industry requirements and small or medium-sized organizations, which is where ERPs for nonprofit organizations come in.
Like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central from Wye Cares, Cloud ERP solutions are incredibly scalable with affordable monthly pricing while removing infrastructure and IT management costs. This means ERP for nonprofits is actually quite accessible and quick to deploy with no upfront hardware costs. Even updates and security are handled automatically.
But it’s important to resist an overbuilt ERP, which can be as detrimental as having no system whatsoever.
It’s crucial to find a technology partner that will work with you to bridge the gap between your nonprofit’s technological needs and your organizational mission to ensure no piece is irrelevant to your goals.
Getting Started With an ERP for My Nonprofit Organization
Getting started with an ERP for your nonprofit organization is as simple as getting in touch with the Wye Cares team. We will first consult with you to locate your critical services, organizational needs, and desired results. Following that, we will design and implement a powerful solution that bridges the people and technology you have with the problems or complications you face every day.
Wye Cares is a team of experienced business technology professionals with extensive knowledge of the necessary procedures that allow nonprofits to excel at their mission. From sizable national food banks to small local charities, we’ve been aiding nonprofit organizations for over 20 years.
An empathetic approach to understanding not-for-profit procedures, cultivated over decades of human-powered missions, means that we are experts in delivering the results necessary for your organization’s success.
Your mission isn’t about technology; it’s about the cause. That’s why our approach is about your people. We empower users to become even more awesome in their role by uncovering their real talents and recognize their superpowers within the context of the software used to strengthen them.
Begin your organization’s next great step towards impacting remarkable community change more efficiently, in compliance, and with greater ease and enthusiasm.