BY MARTY SINGLETON, Blackbaud Solutions Engineer

You wear many hats as part of your college, university, or affiliated foundation business office. And those hats often come with a lot of paperwork. Marty Singleton, Senior Solutions Engineer at Blackbaud, led the finances for a higher education institution and saw first-hand what happened when they started using a fund accounting system with sub-fund capabilities.

In this tip sheet, Marty shares seven ways a fund accounting system can save your team time through better reporting and automation, and help you get closer to a paperless office.

1. Start with out-of-the-box reports.

No need to start from scratch. Because your fund accounting system was built for nonprofit organizations and educational institutions knows the kinds of information you need at your fingertips. Standard reports such as your balance sheet, cash receipts, income statement, and statement of cash flows are only a click away.

2. Create report templates for detail and summary.

From department chairs to donors to auditors, you have many stakeholders who need insight into parts of your college, university, or foundation’s finances. But they don’t all need—or want—the same level of detail. Create report templates in your fund accounting system so you can change from a detailed view that goes 10 levels deep to a summary level with only top-line information. Get reports for different stakeholders without running or reformatting the report each time.

3. Give stakeholders view-only access to reports.

“Teach your stakeholders to fish,” Marty said during the webinar. With view-only access to reports and dashboards, your endowment chairs or department heads can run their own reports instead of asking your team for updated information. You can give them access to the reports and types of information they need to see, and they can make faster data-driven decisions. View-only access also works for auditors, so they can run reports and view invoices, freeing up your time during audit week.

4. Schedule reports to run automatically.

There is some information that your stakeholders need at a specific time each month or quarter. Set up the reports to run on a specific cadence and then be emailed to those stakeholders directly. For example, you can create a customized list of endowed funds and schedule a report on those funds that goes specifically to endowment managers on the 15th of every month.

5. Attach donor agreements directly to project and fund records.

Endowment and scholarship donations often come with restrictions. Instead of digging through folders to double check the donor’s intentions, you can attach the donor agreement and any other paperwork associated with the endowment directly to the project or fund. This will keep everyone on the same page through staff transitions, putting institutional knowledge in the system instead of just the brains of your team members.

6. Automate expense management.

Say goodbye to wadded-up receipts from your advancement team’s latest alumni dinner. With a fund accounting system that includes expense management tools, your team can submit digital copies of receipts with their expense reports. Those can automatically be matched to charges made on a purchase card or brought into your system through credit card feeds. Staff can also submit expense reports through a paperless process. With both workflows, submitters can select approvers who can view everything electronically. Once completed, the business office can review and process all requests, easily adding them to the AP workflow.

7. Streamline AP Processes with Automated Payments

Automated payments use pre-established pathways with individual vendors to match and pay expected invoices directly and seamlessly. Incorporating automated payments into your fund accounting processes removes many of the manual and costly processes that have plagued finance teams for years, such as writing paper checks and managing vendor updates. Invoices move through the process without email reminders or inter-campus envelopes.

Want to see how Blackbaud’s suite of tools can help you streamline your higher education finance office? Check out the recorded webinar, “Ask the Experts: How to Consolidate Your Institution’s Financial Data to Achieve Automation and Efficiency.”