RSMUS.comWhether your faith-based organization is managing day-to-day operations or preparing for growth, its specialized accounting needs can be a lot to handle, especially if you depend on an outdated system. With maximized efficiency and increased visibility, Sage Intacct, a cloud-based financial management solution, can help your organization make greater use of its resources and build stronger support for its programs, funds and ministries.
Simplified chart of accounts and a foundation for growth
The majority of churches and faith-based organizations use older accounting systems with segmented charts of accounts that don’t allow for dimensions. Consider an organization that has five campuses, for example. Keeping track of separate account codes for each of its locations and departments quickly becomes complicated. For example, if each of those five campus locations included 10 departments, you’d have to duplicate that chart of accounts every single time for each of those individual combinations. Add in separate account codes for projects and codes would get even harder to manage.
Intacct is much different from these older systems. Intacct Dimensions gives your organization the ability to separate those components, eliminating all of that duplication and saving time. When you add a campus, you will only need to set up primary account codes. Transactions and operational data can be tagged with dimension values. When your finance team creates a dimension, it can then be used for any transaction, from accounts receivables and accounts payable to the general ledger and revenue management.
Dimensions are the true power of Intacct, allowing for a leaner chart of accounts and adding more depth to all the other ways a faith-based organization might want to expand, report, budget and manage its many facets. In addition to meeting your organization’s current needs, Intacct has the flexibility to support future growth and changes in your organization’s structure. New dimensions can be added as needed, so your organization always has a way to track key data.
Outstanding Reporting Capabilities
Because Intacct is based in the cloud, your organization’s numbers are updated in real-time and can be easily viewed in dashboards and reports. Intacct Dimensions are built into its user-friendly financial report writer. Data can be filtered, grouped and organized by dimensions to create custom reports that give your organization unparalleled visibility into its finances. These reports play an important role in guiding decision-making for boards and congregations.
You can pull the latest figures and produce reports as often as you want, sending them out daily, weekly, monthly or whenever they’re needed. You won’t have to wait for staff members to pull data and put together Excel reports and projections. Creating custom reports that can be distributed quickly has been especially valuable for faith-based organizations during the pandemic.
The hierarchy of dimensions also provides powerful reporting functionality. No matter how long you’ve been using Intacct, you can create new dimensions to align with a new organizational structure. The previous dimensions can then be “rolled-up” and marked as inactive. Deactivating dimensions in Sage Intacct preserves reporting and history but doesn’t allow any new activity on those objects.
The Advantages of Intacct for One Organization
One multi-campus church that also oversees the accounting for mission ministries and other smaller faith-based groups switched from an on-premise church financial management solution to Sage Intacct. As the organization continued to grow, it adopted Intacct to manage fund accounting, payroll, accounts payables, contributions, activity-based budgeting and other needs.
Tagging every expense with Intacct dimensions has expanded the church’s reporting and budgeting capabilities. For each campus, individual income statements and balance sheets are quickly produced. Using the multi-dimensional data from Intacct has helped the church improve the stewardship of its funds. In addition, with time saved on data entry for invoices and expenses, the organization has saved approximately $22,000 annually on staffing costs.
Find out more about how Sage Intacct Dimensions can support the work of your faith-based organization. Schedule a call with one of the experts at RSM today.
