The year-end process is integral to every not-for-profit's accounting activities. Together with our friends at Keela, we hosted the ‘Year-End Reporting Requirements for Nonprofits’ webinar.
During the webinar, we discussed the requirements for nonprofit year-end reporting. From bookkeeping tips to meaningful year-end reports, this conversation covered a variety of topics, including:
- The must-haves for nonprofit year-end reporting
- Tools that can make your year-end bookkeeping process more efficient and
- Meaningful reports for your board
If you didn’t get a chance to tune in to our webinar, here’s a recap of what we discussed.
Must-haves for Nonprofit Year-End Reporting
- Ensure all your organization’s bank and credit card accounts are reconciled
- Know if your organization is getting an audit, a review engagement, or a notice to reader
- Compile all documents - either digitally or hard copy
- Know what types of donations your organization received during the year and if there have been any restrictions imposed on these donations
DOWNLOAD OUR YEAR-END ACCOUNTING CHECKLIST for a detailed task list to help you wrap up your year
The Keela CRM software is a great tool for this as it allows organizations to track the types of donations they have received and feeds the information directly in QuickBooks Online.
Tools to Boost Your Efficiency
For Document Management
With Receipt Bank, users can easily use their smartphone to photograph receipts and invoices. Data will automatically be extracted from the documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. All you have to do is verify that the data extracted is accurate and the information will be published into your online accounting software.
Hubdoc has similar abilities as Receipt Bank, apart from the fact that they can fetch your bank statements and bills from your service providers, and store them into a secure document storage system. Similar to Receipt Bank, receipts, invoices, and bills can be attached to a transaction when published to QuickBooks Online - creating an audit trail if necessary.
For Expense Management
Expensify is great for automating the expense process for your organization. Employees can submit their expenses by taking a photo of their receipt, and Expensify automatically submits an expense report. As an added layer of control, organizations can customize policy rules to flag any expenses that need to be reviewed by a board member.
Cloud-Based Accounting Software
These applications act as the backbone of your accounting function and allow for organizations to set limited permissions, synchronize your bank account transaction feeds, classify funds, leave an audit trail and more!
For Payment Management
Plooto allows signing authorities to approve payments remotely. Once approved, Plooto will submit the payment electronically, while also synchronizing with your online accounting software to mark invoices as paid upon payment completion. With a good payment management system, your organization is provided full visibility into the day-to-day movement of funds in a few clicks.
Meaningful Reports For Your Board
Before you start preparing financial reports, you should determine the needs of your organization and decide whether your organization requires the restricted or deferred method for restricted charitable contributions. This decision will affect your organization’s financial statements.
Apart from your organization’s financial statements, there are other meaningful reports that you should generate for your board, including:
Budget Report
The budget report is a guide to help your organization plan for their future and assess their financial health. By reviewing the budget report with your board of directors, you can measure the organization’s actual spending compared to the approved budget.
Statement of Cash Flow
The statement of cash flow report will reflect if your organization has enough cash moving forward to provide the services that it is mandated to.
Financial Forecast
The financial forecast allows organizations to determine the feasibility in carrying out its mandate.
A big thank you to Keela for co-hosting this webinar with us, as well as the awesome viewers that made this webinar possible. We are proud supporters of the Keela CRM software and are excited to have worked with their team on several initiatives designed to help educate and support Canadian nonprofit organizations.
For viewers with more questions, feel free to reach out to the team here at Enkel, or Keela.
With a great deal of experience working with nonprofit organizations, Enkel can provide reliable bookkeeping services for your organization so you can focus on furthering your mission. Whether your organization is based in Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary or Edmonton, we can help! Contact us to learn more.
How We Select and Evaluate Our Recommended Software
We thoroughly research and test the apps we include in our regular workflow for Client bookkeeping services. After deciding on criteria for evaluating the software and then researching the app itself, we tested the app, noting its strengths and weaknesses. We then work with the app for at least a few weeks before deciding whether to recommend it to our readers. We use the software as it was designed for its intended tasks. For a detailed walk-through of how we select and evaluate software, please see the details of our process.
