The Financial Edge

Let’s face it: You run a nonprofit, which means you spend a lot of time worrying. Is your mission reaching as far as possible? Is your staff well-trained and happy? Are you doing enough to find and secure new donors, patrons, or students? The list of things to keep you up at night can seem endless.

But there’s one thing you shouldn’t worry about, one thing you can’t afford to worry about: whether your finances are being properly managed. There’s just too much at stake. Above anything else, your future depends on the financial decisions you make today. (Breaking into a cold sweat? Hang in there — we’re about to lift that weight from your shoulders!)

With The Financial Edge, you’ll have a heck of a lot of extra time to worry about everything except your organization’s financial health. The Financial Edge truly is an accounting solution for nonprofits that’s leagues above the rest: Simply put, it takes traditional fund accounting data (think abstract numbers and figures), “de-codes” it (sort of like waving its magic wand), and gives it back to you as intelligent information you can use to quickly make the best strategic decisions for your organization. You can also use the intelligent info it churns out to monitor the performance of every initiative or department in real time — and it does all this while keeping you completely transparent and accountable.

Sound too good to be true?

Take a look at how the United States Naval Academy Alumni Association and Foundation uses The Financial Edge to help its leaders make smarter financial decisions.

Or check out how the Minnesota Medical Foundation uses The Financial Edge to simplify its complex reporting needs.

Here are a few other specific examples of things The Financial Edge and its optional modules can handle with its eyes closed:

• Do-It-All Budgeting
• Comprehensive Reporting
• Up-to-the-Minute Analysis
• Increased Accountability

• Perform payroll budgeting, including salary and benefits, on a per-employee basis
• Execute driver-based planning by using parameters and costs that “drive” your organization
• View line-item budget details and notes for details of budget assumptions that make up the overall account budget
• Publish budget guidelines and assumptions to personnel with budget responsibility
• Allocate employees to multiple departments or projects
• Support forecasted budgets with headcount details
• Map payroll periods to budget periods
• Produce “what if” analyses with multiple budgeting scenarios
• Easily combine budgets across budget managers or departments
• Track multiple budget adjustments
• View budget impact of items as they are entered
• Monitor financial commitments through encumbrance tracking

Comprehensive Reporting 

• Quickly and easily access more than 100 flexible, pre-formatted reports including FASB and GASB reports
• Save time with the preformatted report writer
• Use unlimited report templates in the Visual Chart Organizer
• Run reports with the innovative template-based reporting system
• Easily create custom reports to your exact specifications
• Manage and access reports quickly and easily
• Create customized financial statements
• Control the presentation of financial information with the Visual Chart Organizer
• Easily create separate reports by project or transaction code
• Apply new security options to reports
• Limit access to information in reports
• Design your own report layouts with “drag-and-drop” functionality
• Summarize data for years where transaction detail is not required but you need comparative information

Up-to-the-Minute Analysis

• Cash flow
• Budget vs. actual
• Revenue and expense by grant
• Outstanding invoices
• Pending purchase orders
• Income and expenses
• Financial comparisons

Increased Accountability 

• Share timely, accurate information with key stakeholders
• Ensure donated funds are accounted for and protected
• Quickly respond to your auditor’s request for supporting detail
• Verify to donors that gifts were used for their intended purpose
• Satisfy both internal and external reporting requirements
• Easily produce presentation-quality reports and analyses to key stakeholders
• Rely on strong internal controls
• Monitor key initiatives and programs from the Dashboard
• Drill down into system records from any panel
• Access unlimited dashboards to individually monitor important activities or tasks
• Use the query panel to monitor organization specific measurements
• Observe key financial ratios
• Check revenues and expenses as well as net surplus or deficit
• Drill down to accounts and transactions making up those balances
• Drill back to original invoices and their project distributions
• Attach minutes of telephone conversations and discussions to the Notes tab
• Allocate and track endowment appreciation and earnings