How charities can predict their financial future

Managing our finances is no easy task. For the charity sector, it is perhaps yet harder, lacking both the financial literacy and the necessary resources to be able to do so as thoroughly as they’d like.

From the outside looking in, financial management simply looks too complex to manage successfully without dedicating time that charities simply do not have to learn new jargon, new skills, and new tools.

While it’s clear that the sector needs guidance, those who do have the financial know-how are also struggling to find the time to put the processes in place to do just that.

More than three quarters of finance leaders’ days are consumed by routine accounting work and protecting their organisation against risks, giving them less time to fully develop a strategy.

Ironically, this then leads to hasty decision making, with organisations only able to react to problems rather than preventing them in the first place. More than a third of senior finance leaders admit their finance function is not proactive enough in using data and analytics to identify, prioritise, and address critical issues.

Fortunately, there is another way. A new e-book, from cloud-based financial management provider Sage Intacct, demonstrates how organisations can pursue their mission more efficiently being led by data, rather than reactive measures.

Each chapter offers advice on how charities can improve performance, with tips on how to use data to drive strategy and analyse key metrics, as well as information on synchronising multiple management systems and streamlining manual processes.

It also provides educational resources to help charities to choose the right accounting software for them, what to look for, and what benefits they can drive.

Using Sage Intacct, for example, charity finance leaders saw a 40% increase in their donors or customer base, along with a 20% growth in new grant funding, all because they were able to free up time to be more strategic and make better decisions.

Sage Intacct was designed to make it easy for charities to bring together information from many data sources for more-informed analysis and decision-making.

The goal of the e-book is likewise: to provide a map for financial leaders in the charity sector and make it easier for them to steer the ship on the right course.