Meeting the challenges facing
Finance in Charities and Not for Profit
The Finance team in charitable and not-for-profit organisations have
always had a challenging time, with numerous stakeholders requiring reports
in different formats, complex VAT recovery, and the added responsibility of
tracking restricted and unrestricted funds. However, over recent years a
number of factors have placed additional burdens on these organisations:
- There is an increasing demand for transparency and accountability from all sides, including donors, trustees, committees, patrons, management, the public, the tax authorities, and regulators.
- In the case of charities and aid agencies, there is increasing "competition" for donor's funds.
- Investment returns have been declining
Charity Finance Specialists
The combination of the market leading SunSystems (SunAccount)
charity accounts software and LAKE's focus on the Not for Profit sector helps deliver solutions to the challenges faced by these kinds of organisations:
Understand how resources are generated and expended by aim/objective, fund, program, project, cost centre, office, donor etc
With a LAKE Not for Profit solution you can analyse activity mapped against your own individual key performance indicators. And user-friendly, graphical drill-down tools ensure that you can uncover and analyze the trends, problems and opportunities that are often concealed in your detailed transactional data.
Track movements in every fund, distinguishing between restricted and unrestricted funds
The LAKE Not for Profit solution will allow you to account for any number of funds, track incoming resources and show how those funds have been used, down to the last penny.
Report to SORP standards
The LAKE Not for Profit solution includes SORP compliance as standard.
Account for partial or non-recoverable VAT
With 16 years pedigree in this sector, the
LAKE Not for Profit solution will deal with all your VAT requirements,
however unusual they may seem.
Manage moving budgets and deliver updated Forecasts on an as-needed basis
With a LAKE solution that includes SunSystems Budgeting and Forecasting, Finance becomes a true value-add function.
The solution builds on the underlying General Ledger code structures and supports continuous budgeting, rolling forecasts, and "what-if" analyses.
With detailed operational plans (e.g. by Fund, Aim, Department, Project, etc) feeding into the Income and Expenditure, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statements, SunSystems:
- encourages collaboration between different parts of the organisation
- removes the risk and sheer overhead of dozens of inter-linked spreadsheets
The combination of SunSystems and LAKE's rapid implementation method represents a cost-effective Budgeting and Forecasting solution for your organisation.
Keep the organisation to its budget and positively prevent over-spend
The LAKE Not for Profit solution allows you to delegate authority with absolute confidence that spend will be kept safely within budget. It provides complete visibility of the cost pipeline and related cash flow requirements as soon as orders are requested and only allows over-spend with appropriate authority.
Reduce management and administration overheads to free up resources
The LAKE Not for Profit solution allows you to streamline the buying process, and introduce standards and procedures designed to bring spend under control and leverage the organisation's buying power while saving time and money.
Manage the yield of investments
The LAKE Not for Profit solution allows you to integrate with any number of investment, property, or treasury systems. Furthermore, the reporting and inquiry tools operate across databases allowing you to monitor in detail how investments are performing against plan.
Produce reports to numerous stakeholders at the click of a mouse
At the click of a mouse the LAKE Not for Profit solution allows you to produce reports from the same underlying database for all interested stakeholders; including donors, trustees, committees, patrons, management, the public, the government, and regulatory authorities.
