5 Essentials for Nonprofit Accounting

According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, nonprofits account for 5.3% of the GDP. That equals more than 1.5 million organizations accounting for 9.2% of all wages and salaries paid in the United States. That many organizations, all handling money on a daily basis, require a powerful accounting software solution. Denali FUND from Cougar Mountain Software is designed to handle the breadth of these organizations from the smallest to the largest, as well as the complexity of each organization’s individual finances.

Nonprofit accounting requires flexibility and customization. Nothing captures the essentials of nonprofit accounting agility like Cougar Mountain Software’s Denali FUND. Denali FUND offers modular flexibility, breakout budgets, a secure audit trail, individual user tracking, and customized reporting. Putting these essentials to work with Denali FUND will solve your nonprofit accounting challenges in an accessible and tailored format.

Denali FUND is endlessly adaptable through its modular flexibility. There are countless types of nonprofit organizations, making customizable accounting solutions essential. Denali FUND offers customizable modules to reflect any industry and mission statement. With numerous add-on modules, Denali can adapt to any type of business, and you can scale it to fit large or small organizations. Additional flexibility is delivered through its add-on features. Denali FUND is capable of handling unlimited funds, delineations, and can grow to accommodate as many accounts as required.

Denali delivers breakout budget capability to nonprofit accounting. Nonprofits acquire their funds from a variety of sources, and at different times of the year—making breakout budgets essential to effective accounting. Denali FUND enables you to track these funds separately. Nonprofit accountants also need to keep tabs on whether those funds are restricted, unrestricted, or temporarily restricted and Denali FUND makes it easy to do. Denali also allows users to track and compare individual budgets. As nonprofits increase in sophistication, Denali provides the ability for accountants to view breakout budgets that provide individual fund-to-fund detail. Access to side-by-side comparisons at a glance keeps the most important information accessible and at your fingertips.

Let’s be honest, sometimes nonprofits hire for enthusiasm over ethics. Add to this the inherent trust and leniency many nonprofits show enthusiastic mission-oriented employees, and Denali might need to ride to the accounting rescue with secure audit trails. Denali’s audit trail functionality ensures that “honest people stay honest.” Denali FUND accounts for every entry, every edit, and every deletion—every time! Fully deployed, Denali FUND makes your accounting bulletproof.

The accountability the audit trail provides is enhanced by the added capability of individual user tracking. Nonprofits often have loose organizational structures and “many hands in the cookie jar.” Denali FUND anticipates and solves this nonprofit accounting dilemma with individual user accounts. This functionality allows for individual-based access when it comes to the accounting, handling of funds, or the day-to-day operation of the organization. Denali’s individual user accounts allow you to isolate who is responsible for specific activities such as entries, edits, and deletions. And to further sort out responsibilities and “who did what,” Denali FUND allows you to set permissions to allow access to those who need it and prevent it to those who don’t.

With every nonprofit having a different mission or objective, customized reporting is essential. Denali recognizes the uniqueness of nonprofits and their distinctive missions by offering them the ability to create reports identifying and measuring the factors most important to them. Cougar Mountain Software also has the ability to build customized Crystal Reports that meet the specific needs of any organization. Reports can be separated, combined, and customized via filters for program tracking with granular fund identifiers.

Nonprofits present unique accounting challenges that require a tailored approach customized to the needs of each nonprofit organization. Denali offers nonprofits large and small, sophisticated and unsophisticated, an accounting software solution that will offer modular flexibility, breakout budgets, a secure audit trail, individual user tracking and customized reporting. If your nonprofit needs to solve its accounting problem, Denali FUND is the solution.