When you’re running a non-profit, the time you should devote to your budget can get tight quickly. Soon enough all the room in your schedule for taking care of financial matters will be spent on balancing the books and going to the bank, with little time left for crucial aspects of growth like forecast analysis. You may not have time to even consider that every month’s budget is a wealth of useful data to use in many things including forecast analysis. Many organizational leaders simply don’t have time to use this data to its full potential because they are too busy with other aspects of the company. But there are tools that exist to make budgeting much simpler, and even offer you automated processes that make forecast analysis a quick and easy way to plot out different scenarios based on past and present trends in your data.
Budget rollup
Budget rollup can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of taking care of your budget at the end of each month, and especially at the end of the fiscal year. This mindless task of manually inputting data to the master sheet and making sure everything lines up the way it ought to is not only time consuming, but also mind numbing. The task often falls to people whose skills would be far more valuable doing something more useful for the company, but without the right tools there is no way around it. With budgeting software, rollup can be completely automated and secure.
Automatic data consolidation
With structures established in a tool like Questica’s budget solution, data consolidation, including your budget rollup, are done automatically, freeing managers up to do things like forecast analysis with their time, instead of punching numbers. With a wide range of formats for review and analysis, you will finally be able to do all those creative and future minded tasks you’ve been wanting to with the financial data you’ve accumulated over the months and years.
Track workflow
If you spend time passing around a single spreadsheet and have to track approvals manually at each process, then you are losing valuable amount of time that could’ve been spent with a click of a button with budgeting software. With automated budget processes at your fingertips you will never have to open a spreadsheet and sort through the edits that the previous person had made. Budget managers can have access to the budget data specific to their department and their notes and budget details can all be localized in one central system.
If your budget management processes have consistently been a headache, or just painfully inefficient, it’s time to consider upgrading your tools. While spreadsheets are useful and a fine way of doing things, they lack the automation that can really take the weight off this daunting monthly task. Not only will they lighten your workload, especially when it comes to low-skilled tasks, but they will set you up to grow your nonprofit by affording you the time to perform forecast analysis for any and all departments in your organization. With a secure and universal platform, you can count on your management to have time to do the same.
Consider checking out Questica’s non-profit budget solution, we have the software to help. If you are interested in trying out Questica, you can visit our website and request a demo today.
