Your Nonprofit Could Be Susceptible to Fraud
Your nonprofit organization means everything to you. The work you do matters and as a leader of your nonprofit, it’s your fiduciary responsibility to make a choice that will keep your nonprofit out of the hands of fraud. But you can only continue your work if you have money to support it. How do you manage the money your nonprofit receives, but still keep it safe from embezzlement?
If a one-size-fits-all accounting solution is your answer, you may be leaving your organization susceptible to fraud.
Consider this: Your nonprofit goes through an audit and the auditor finds some discrepancies in your data. What happened? When you look through your history you find several inconsistencies, but you don’t have an audit trail to explain where the inconsistencies were made or who is responsible for making them. In the end, you are astonished to discover that someone within your organization has been altering your entries, and embezzling money from your organization.
This is one of the main situations nonprofits find themselves in that can lead to a failed audit. In many off-the-shelf accounting programs, any user can use a general login to access the software and make changes to the entries. A user can edit or even delete saved data. So, if you enter a $500 cash donation into the software, another user can easily change the donation to $300, pocket the difference, and you would have no record of the activity.
A secure audit trail allows you to see any changes to the data, who made them, and when—nothing can ever be deleted. This audit trail is designed to keep your organization GAAP-compliant. If an auditor asks for information about some discrepancies, you can trace the problem back to the specific entries, who made them, and exactly when those entries occurred.
If your organization has multiple users, setting up individual user rights gives you the ability to manage the access of users based on their role within your organization by giving each user their own unique login. The unique login gives you the ability to identify when a user is in the software and what they have done. Access can be granted or restricted to something as general as a module or more specific to certain functions. No matter how you set up their access, you can control which users can perform certain functions.
When using software incorporating both a secure audit trail and individual user rights as part of its internal controls, you can ensure only users with permission have access to sensitive data and you can trace every entry and adjustment in the software.
At Cougar Mountain Software we are nonprofit-loving, organization-obsessed, accounting perfectionists. We understand accounting for every penny can be difficult, which is why we created Denali Fund, a complete accounting solution specifically designed for nonprofits. Denali Fund gives you an unbreakable audit trail, individual user rights, world-class customer service, and much, much, more.
To learn more about Denali Fund call (800)388-3038 or click the link below to learn how you can save 30% on your software and our 60-day trial!
