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Syncing Grant Budgets and Administrative Budgets

The good news is you have multiple grants funding your mission.  The bad news is tracking and reporting on grant budgets can make anyone’s head spin – especially if grants cover multiple fiscal years and you’re using spreadsheets for tracking and reporting for your nonprofit.

Difficulties creep in when trying to match the grant year reporting with your fiscal year reporting.  Or the anticipated spending was either accelerated or delayed.  Perhaps you hired staff based on the grant and those candidates were found and hired faster than you had anticipated.  Or participant enrollment was slower than anticipated.  These and many other circumstances can, and often do, occur in a way not consistent with the budget and plan.  It’s not that you’ve overspent or underspent – it’s simply a timing issue.

Timing issues can contribute to administrative reports appearing to be out of synch with budget reports – which can be confusing with a single grant, let alone dozens of grants.

Our job as Finance Directors is to have complete clarity on where the organization is financially and communicate that in way that key stakeholders (boards, executives, funders, etc.) can easily understand.

AccuFund assists Finance Directors and Grant Managers with clear and concise reports that allow you to adjust to your fiscal year administrative budget, report on the grant separately, or report as a whole – all within the AccuFund accounting system – eliminating the time spent on manually adjusting spreadsheets.

AccuFund allows you to track a grant budget in a separate ledger.  It also maintains initial budgets and any subsequent adjusted budgets when circumstances affect change to the original plan.  The account structure helps you easily report on restricted, unrestricted and administrative expenditures.

The fact that AccuFund will address cross fiscal year reporting ensures that there is no mirage of what appears to be a surplus of funds or overhead expenses appearing too high or other common funding issues distorting the true financial status of your organization.  AccuFund does more than protect the credibility of your numbers, it gives busy Finance Directors welcome peace of mind.

Authors

Dawn Westerberg