Not-for-Profit Struggling With FP&A? Here’s How to Solve It (+examples)

We hear it all the time from clients - your not-for-profit (NFP) is being asked to “do more with less”. 

Leaner, faster, more robust, getting all your financial planning and analysis tasks done - but without the big budget or robust set of tools that commercial organizations have access to. 

This fixation on doing more with less has put a lot of pressure on finance teams and their departments. 

But this is a vicious cycle: by not providing their teams with the appropriate FP&A software, these challenges only end up draining resources and revenue from your organization, compounding on the already-present stress and redoubling calls to do ‘less with more’ (we know - we’re just as tired of hearing it ). 

But here’s the kicker - there actually is a way to do more with less - Limelight Software. 

Our leading cloud FP&A software can put an end to your FP&A challenges, restore your time, reduce stress, and provide a number of additional benefits including robust workforce planning capabilities and forecasting functionality that move your business forward/

Let’s now go over some common NFP FP&A challenges, and how to solve them with Limelight. These include: 

• Excel doesn’t scale
• Inability to access real-time data for forecasting
• Varied funding sources

Excel Doesn’t Scale

Excel works for small NFPs. But your spreadsheets can multiply from a few dozen to a few dozen hundred as you grow. At that point, they become unwieldy and unmanageable; finance planning and analysis directors increasingly find themselves spending seemingly endless hours trawling these spreadsheets.

Worse yet, these hard-to-search spreadsheets will often be the only way to answer budget queries, run reports, develop what-if scenario planning. Couple this bottleneck with the need to track multiple sources of funding (grants, donations, etc.), and this process can end up eating away at huge chunks of the finance team’s time. 

Automation is among the most obvious solutions here. By being able to delegate rote and repetitive tasks to computers, you’re freeing up your finance experts to concentrate their efforts on more critical finance concerns. 

Leveraging cloud technology can also help reduce roadblocks by allowing for easier collaboration and searchability when managing your finances. 

Inability to Access Real-Time Data for Forecasting

Similar to the issue with collaboration above, forecasting can be a laborious, time-draining process due to the need to send emails to multiple departments and otherwise chase key (busy) organization members down for their data. 

Once you have the data, you have to of course verify its accuracy, then incorporate it into the forecast, and by the time you’re done, the forecast may be using figures that are several weeks or months old! 

That’s hardly efficient or all that useful considering your data is already stale by the time it’s incorporated into a forecast. 

Limelight allows you to leverage real-time data and incorporate easily into your forecasts is critical to both saving time and gleaning insights based on actionable, up-to-date data.

Varied Funding Sources

Cash flow for NFPs is harder to track than for many organizations of similar sizes due to the variance in funding sources. Whereas commercial organizations need only track a few products or services, NFPs must make note of every grant, small and large, as well as donations. 

This is especially important in today’s NFP environment where financial transparency is critical to earning the trust of the public. 

Collating and concentrating this multi-sourced data can take a long time and require a lot of double- or even triple-checking. Again, considering that NFPs are already attempting to do more with less, this can strain already thin resources. 

Being able to centralize this data with a tool or platform can help reduce these roadblocks. 

What’s more, automation programs can help ensure that the data is automatically updated across multiple sheets, budgets, etc. with a single input, saving hours of time. 

Resolving NFP FP&A Challenges - in One Minute

While FP&A for your organization may have been frustrating in the past, that doesn’t mean that it has to be in the future. With the right tools and adjustments, your organization can more ably handle its FP&A duties, empowering your team with more data-driven insights as well as restoring hours of their time. 

See how Communication Service for the Deaf NFP cut its budgeting process in half. And find out more about how Limelight can play a part in totally eliminating your FP&A struggles with leading FP&A software.