RSMUS.comIs your foundation managing grant reporting, restricted schedules and cost-reimbursable tracking manually? For increased accuracy and efficiency, these processes can be automated in Sage Intacct, a cloud-based accounting solution, giving your organization more time to focus on its mission.
For foundations, the real benefit from Intacct is its ability to provide clear, precise reporting and dashboards that can help with your organization’s donor reporting. Intacct can also help drive your revenue recognition for cost reimbursable grants, such as federal grants. The grant module, also referred to as the project module in Intacct, can open your foundation up to a wealth of opportunities.
Keep track of reimbursable costs
To get clear reporting, foundations can leverage the grant module and take advantage of the grant billing feature. It allows your organization to efficiently keep track of reimbursable costs and easily invoice from those costs. You can monitor the costs that are being recorded through modules like purchasing, as well as labor costs and expense reports.
Those costs can be tracked as billable back to the funder using item dimensions. Then, they can be used to generate invoices based on the costs recorded in the general ledger. Building invoices that bring in those cost details no longer has to be done manually. Invoices can be generated based on the type of revenue stream, whether a federal grant, a state and local grant or some other type of grant. Also, your organization can easily recognize revenue correctly, based on those reimbursable costs.
Use dimensions to monitor donations
In addition to reimbursable grants, your organization is likely receiving foundation awards and gifts that are budgeted from the front end. There’s no need to record costs and then reimburse them for these kinds of gifts. However, donors may put restrictions on how and when the money can be spent, whether it’s for a specific time period or a particular purpose.
Using Intacct dimensionality, you can record that revenue as it is received or as it should be recognized. Then, the revenue can be marked with any necessary dimension or restriction. You can even specify the type of restriction, whether it’s time-restricted or purpose-restricted. Then, you can report on those restricted balances. You can track revenue based on non-calendar grant periods by using the inception-to-date reporting period.
Following nonprofit accounting standards, the funds from those particular awards will be used and dimensions will keep up with those restricted funds through the end of the period. To get an accurate ending balance for a particular grant, you can pull the funds from the grant values that show the funds have been released. These restrictions can also be used as income statement activity is closed out at the end of the year. If needed, your organization can bring a carryover balance into a future year and see where lingering restricted grant balances are at from fiscal year to fiscal year.
How one foundation benefits from Intacct
Before moving to Intacct, a nonprofit organization that received multiple foundation awards to fund its mission struggled to produce donor reports in a timely manner. Foundation employees built and updated each report individually in spreadsheets, carefully adhering to the unique reporting requirements for each donor and gift.
Now that the foundation uses Intacct, it saves days producing grant reports. As the organization receives new gifts and expends the received funds, all of the activity can be associated directly to the grant using the dimensionality of Intacct. This data is easily placed into grant reports to show both life-to-date balances and grant balances broken out into unique grant periods.
To find out more about how your foundation can benefit from Sage Intacct, schedule a call with one of the experts at RSM today.
