Blogs

MAY 2, 2017 BY XLEDGER STAFF WRITERS

We just concluded a three-part series on non-profit CFO Roger Dalton. You can catch up on Five Days Without Xledger: Part 3 here.

While Roger is fictive, he faces real-world problems—accountants and CFOs, whether non- or for-profit, suffer many same or similar pain-points and stresses. Nationwide, nonprofits struggle with unwieldy financial software providers. For-profits often fall prey to self-proclaimed ‘hybrid’ solutions. The cost of inefficiency increases in tandem with tech advances.

Here are three vital lessons we learned from Roger’s story:

Financial Software Makes a Difference to Nonprofits

Roger is a concentrate of many non-profit ailments. Saddled with solutions like (eerily similar to) his current accounting system, they pay high rates for what they can’t search within, can’t present within, and can hardly understand. There’s no drill-down option or reliable search function. And forget about presentation formatting. The quarterly drag on finances parallels an immense human cost. The stress of CPAs and CFOs corresponds to clients the non-profit leaves unserved—refugees unaided, transients unhoused, animals unsheltered, etc.

The Right Financial Software Might Answer the NSC

Add the Non-profit Starvation Cycle and watch the chasm deepen. Roger’s nonprofit battles to keep its overhead under 17%–between five and seven percent higher than many donors want. Such demands push nonprofits to fudge numbers or do with less, driving the cycle ‘round. Failing to respond means failing to survive. Rather than creative accounting, perhaps creative thinking holds the answer. Modern tech extends top-flight accounting software to small and medium organizations. With true-cloud financial solutions that cut overhead and streamline operations, non-profits could end the cycle mid-spin.

True-Cloud: The First Best Hope

Part two saw Roger deciding among three platforms: on-premise, hybrid, and cloud-based financial management solutions. On-premise solutions mire nonprofits in quicksand fees, from yearly licensure to costly upgrades and, of course, physical installation and maintenance. Once revolutionary, on-premise solutions have long since become dangerous anachronisms. So-called ‘hybrid’ systems make a fool’s bargain: part in the cloud, part in the past. They’re hamstrung from the start: dissimilar formats, misleading claims, shadowy backers, and the worst of the on-premise world (but don’t worry; customers get a few cloud modules to try and wrangle into the mix).

Modern non-profits need a solution born, housed, and updated in the cloud. Xledger stands apart for its industry-best automation, its free and quarterly updates, best-in-class reporting and analytics and for its unmatched solution of non- and for-profit accounting tools.