Nonprofits are busy working toward what's important: their mission. This leaves little time for managing expense reports manually. Here are three excellent reasons to automate nonprofit expense reporting:
- Doing expense reports by hand is a waste of time and money. Manual expense reporting eats up a lot of time, money, and effort; plus, it can leave your administrators and employees feeling overwhelmed by their administrative work. Expense reports by a spreadsheet are subject to mistakes that can cost hundreds of dollars to track down and fix. Plus, they'll need to track the spreadsheet and the receipt.
The solution is automated software built specifically to meet the needs of nonprofits. A 2015 Aberdeen Group report says that companies with best-in-class T&E expense software "require 43% less time to fill out an expense report." Plus, the cost of processing each report goes down with automated software (from an average of $31.83 per expense report to $25.97). The report also found that employees and executives spent less time on each report, decreasing from 3 hours to 1.7 hours (a 56% savings in time per report).
These numbers show that moving from a manual to an automated system will make a big difference in any nonprofit's bottom line.
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- Grant management can be made simpler. A manual system doesn't allow for quickly and easily tracking projects & grants, which are a major source of nonprofit funding. Tracking projects and grants has to be done because donors require transparency about how money is being spent.
Automated expense reporting software can come built in with integrated project/grant tracking. Plus, the software can match expenses to projects or grants so that at the end of week, period, month, or year, better decisions can be made about how to most efficiently spend money and there's a record of where money went. - Make compliance take less work. Nonprofits need to find a solution that will automatically take care of their compliance requirements. Sometimes, contracts or grants come with particular restrictions. Other times, the government has particular rules about how nonprofits can manage their funding. Both need to be accommodated for.
An automated software solution takes inputted rules and policies and matches all expenses against those rules. Then, expense reports that do not meet validation requirements can be automatically rejected, saving admins the time of processing that rejection and giving the employee another change to fix it and resubmit it.
In addition, perhaps your nonprofit is conducting business in more than one country, and each country has their own local rules. An automated system can manage those rules to ensure that all submissions are compliant.
Beyond supporting the core requirement that nonprofits have to manage funding more intelligently, to track projects & grants more easily, and make compliance easier than ever, automated software can also meet your timesheet and leave management needs. Learn more about DATABASICS Time + Expense for nonprofits™ and its robust reporting capabilities.
For more information on the DATABASICS Time & Expense solutions, contact us, or call (800) 599-0434.
DATABASICS provides cloud-based, next generation Expense Reporting, P-Card Management, Timesheet & Leave Management, and Invoice Processing automation. Specializing in meeting the most rigorous requirements, DATABASICS offers the highest level of service to its customers around the world.
DATABASICS is relied upon by leading organizations representing all the major sectors of the global economy: financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, research, retail, engineering, non-profits/NGOs, technology, federal contractors, and other sectors.
DATABASICS is headquartered in Reston, VA.