Sage Intacct recently conducted a survey of nonprofit financial professionals, spanning small to large organizations with both single and multiple entities across a wide range of industries. Below is what your peers shared with us as their biggest pain points as part of the survey, as well as how to overcome them.

Biggest Nonprofit Pain Points

Below are the top 5.

Reporting

Nonprofit survey respondents said the #1 biggest pain point is that reporting is manual and time consuming, which causes the following problems:

• Delayed reporting
• Error prone spreadsheets
• Lost time and inefficiency: especially for multi-entities that need to be rolled up

The survey also revealed that over 20% of respondents spend >40 hours per month consolidating data into Excel, and over 45% spend at least 25 hours.

Today's nonprofit world is characterized by greater competition for funding and increased scrutiny of your impact. This is sometimes due to fraud or poor performance of just a few nonprofits, which affect the whole.

Whatever the case, this represents an opportunity for your nonprofit to be transparent, to demonstrate accountability and to strengthen your reputation with funders and the community. And one way to do so is for your financials to be "audit ready" so that you can prove financial health and how you are investing funds in your mission, even if you are not audited.

How can you be audit-ready in a way that enables your nonprofit but doesn't hurt your Return on Mission? Investing in the right nonprofit accounting software is central to the answer.

Having been a Microsoft Dynamics GP partner for 30 years, we understand why some nonprofits think of GP as "Great Pains." GP was very useful for a long time but lacks cloud access, fund accounting, grant management, dimensions, and other things that can shave weeks off of monthly closings and preclude the need to add finance staff, even as transactional volumes increase.

Is it time to transition your organization's accounting software? It's challenging to navigate today's dynamic environment with technology that was designed pre-internet. With increased oversight, competition for funding, and expanding compliance requirements, your organization should be leveraging the modern technology available today. Do you find your organization struggling with lack of flexibility, real time visibility, easy reporting, and automation of key processes? Would you like to enjoy easy integration between your solutions, providing instant visibility to key metrics, outcomes and performance?

The technology revolution has made these types of functionality the norm rather than the exception. It is critical to work with an easy-to-use system that supports an evolving environment. To maximize your Return on Mission, you'll need a modern, best-in-class cloud accounting solution: Sage Intacct.

The transition to ASC 606 for nonprofits is here for some and looms on the horizon for others. Are you ready? Can your accounting software handle the new revenue recognition requirements?

For nonprofits to be fully prepared, it's important to know the following, as covered in this blog:

• Effective dates
• Understanding new revenue recognition rules
• Determining if you have the right accounting software to handle revenue recognition requirements