Fund Accounting Software vs. Basic Accounting Software - What You Need to Know

Tracking by Funding Source

Fund accounting software allows you to track funding sources in a way that is useful to you, by department, program, grant, profit center, and more. Since information is tracked this way, reports can be pulled and viewed for each source, and the data is easily understood.

Advanced Budgeting

Fund accounting software provides budgeting tools so you are more accurate in your budget projections and reporting. You have the ability to budget by fund and by department, giving department heads or managers the information they need to quickly compare their actual spending to the budget.

Customized Reporting

Because non-profits have different reporting requirements than other organizations or businesses, it’s important to have a customized reporting tool that allows you to edit and save reports tailored to your specific needs.

Small Things Can Make A Difference: A Good Transaction Audit Trail

Internal Controls have been a big buzz phrase in the accounting industry for the last several years. Part of having good internal software controls is to have a good audit trail. Without an audit trail, it is difficult to hold your employees accountable when they make errors, or worse, when fraudulent transactions have been entered.

For companies that have multiple employees entering and editing transactions in accounting and business software, it is important to know who added a transaction and when it was posted. If you don’t have that information, how can you hold employees accountable?

A good audit trail system should include the following features:

  • Keeps a user record for each transaction entered into the system.
  • Keeps the date and time of each transaction entry.
  • When a transaction is edited the system maintains a record of the original transaction.
  • The new edited transaction record must contain the user that edited it along with the date and time it was edited.
  • Ability to track the history of edited records, when multiple edits have been processed.
  • If the system allows checks and invoices to be reprinted the system must keep a record of who reprinted the documents, the date, time and the number of times the documents have been reprinted and any original information that was changed.
  • The ability to prevent duplicate numbers for checks and customer invoices.

Take the (F) Score to see what makes you FASCINATE!

Last month, I attended the NAMA Agri-Marketing Conference in Kansas, Missouri. This conference boasts the best of the best in the Agri-marketing world, and the training seminars are excellent.

Keynote speaker, Sally Hogshead, the author of FASCINATE: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, gave a fabulous presentation that was enlightening, motivating and very entertaining. Sally is a national award-winning advertising writer, author, and brand consultant and has helped the likes of Starbucks and Microsoft. She has also been featured in the New York Times, Today show, CBS, ABC, and the list goes on and on.

Sally has researched why we are fascinated by some companies, or people, and not others, and the results of this research are eye-opening and, well fascinating! To quote Sally, “People. Products. Brands. My mission is to uncover what makes these things fascinating, and how we can use those innate qualities to make more persuasive marketing messages.”

How are you fascinating? Sally says it all comes down to seven personality triggers, and she and her staff have developed the (F) Score Brand Personality Test to help you uncover your triggers. Take the (F) Score to see what makes you FASCINATE!