Three Free Tools For Managing It All

Thursday January 2, 2020 comments Tags: nonprofit, accounting, tools

Any accounting business or tax advice in this podcast is not intended as a thorough in depth analysis of specific issues nor subs to for formal opinion, nor is it sufficient to avoid tax related penalties. If you need any help with that, please reach out. Otherwise, back to the episode. Hey, Hey. Hey, it is Chyla Graham, a synergy accounting advisory. This is another episode of the nonprofit nuggets podcast where we are aiming to help the overwhelmed nonprofit leader. I feel a little less exam anxiety about money so they can go out and make an impact. Had day's episode. I want to talk to you about some free tools that you can use to show your organization's impact. To make it a little bit easier. One is an organizational calendar, so this is a calendar that you can share with everyone on your team.

Be that board members, be that, um, volunteers who are a little bit more integrated into like the operations of things. And this calendar is so that people know, Hey, when are we applying for a grant? Or when is a board meeting, when our nine nineties due, when is the audit? Having one organization wide calendar where all of these things live makes it easier for you to tell a person, Hey can you help me with this? This is when it's due and they can see it in real time. They can decide to invite them. You can invite them to that calendar. This is helpful so that you know when it's peril and you can think about do what we have cash on that day. So think about, um, whatever platform or use, um, if you're, you know, on Mac or if you're using it, you're a Mormon Android and using a Google calendar.

Think about how you can create an organization calendar that you can share all of your upcoming important dates with people so they can know, Hey, when is something happening? And you can think of a better time to pull them into the process so they can help you cause he can't do it alone. Then on the other front in terms of what else you can use Google drive. Yeah, yeah, be playing. So what I see a lot is organizations that consistently forget to save receipts or save documents or their team is remote or in the field and so they are constantly waiting for something. They have to figure out how do they get this information and you have to wait till you give it to the office to go to the file cabinet.

That's inefficient. So I recommend everyone, if you're using Google, use Google drive, create folders for whatever you need. If that's a folder for this month, receipts this month, invoices, it's a folder of your EIN number. That's something I used to get asked for frequently. A copy of your tax exempt letter, putting all of that in a folder so you can just share out the link or you can direct the team. So this is where this thing is. You want to make people as self-sufficient as possible so that again, if you're ever down or out of the office, they don't have to wait for you to get back and they have direction on where they can find something and it doesn't always rely on you to get it and be. Final thing I want to share with you, which also integrates with it's going to be on Google drive is sheets.

So if you are not yet at the point where you have a CRM or that's a customer relationship manager that you are keeping all of your donors in, use a spreadsheet for your first one. Maybe you want to export it from however you're hitting your money. Maybe you're doing PayPal, you want to explore a report there and get a list. What, uh, one organization I used to work with, they, they literally just had one spreadsheet that had all of the donor information. So how much did they give and when did they give it, what was their restriction? This is super helpful so that you can see the lifetime of a donor. Maybe you can see some trends in terms of when they might give to an organization, your organization or what they're giving. And I would recommend doing two versions of this. You could have one by year or you can say, Hey across, we're going to have each month of the year and then going down, we have the name of each donor, would their contact information and then in January they gave 50 and then in June they gave another 50 and at the end of the year they gave a hundred.

So that's your initial detailed version. And then having a summary version where you're saying by year for this donor, that way you can start to see, Hey, what's happening, what's going on? And when you're ready to move into a bigger system, you have all that data already and you're not literally looking at five cabinets worth of things. Again, this will help you because you're using sheets. You can now sort this information so that you can get the data you want. Maybe you want to group them that way. If you decide, Oh crap, um, I'm just going to add names as I go. Like maybe you don't want to cool find that person's name again, but you want to add them to the bottom of the list and say they eat this much money in June. You can hide all those previous months so you're only looking at the current month.

But then when you're looking for the actual month or you're looking to put together that summary, you can unhide, you can sort so that their name would goes in the right order or you can see them clustered next to them, see them clustered and you can have that data. Another cool point about using bad is that you can now have view only access. So if you are the development person, you can say, I'm going to be the one to edit it, but my accounting team will have be on the access and the EDC will have you only access if you are all three of these people. No worries. But that way you now can share this information to other people can see it for what they might need it for. But not be able to edit it and manipulate it so you don't have to worry about accidental changes because you are the only one using it.

So those are my three things that I will recommend you looking into and integrating. This is your organization calendar so that you can now be able to delegate and have a big picture view about when things are happening. You don't overwhelm your schedule. Two is use Google drive. That way you can put documents on there that other people from the team can use and they don't have to wait for you to get back to the office. You can just say, Hey, share or Hey, it's in this folder and three using Google sheets to track donations that come in. That way you can keep a running list people to tell what people are giving to you. Be able to summarize that or get a detailed version so that you can see some trends of giving. This of course is before you go B, go to a more robust system, but yeah, as you're growing, I think these are some really great tools that you can infiltrate pretty easily. Most people are going to be comfortable using and you can have one less thing to worry about. One less thing to do and you can help people support you. Hope this is helpful. Let me know. Tag us at synergy advisory hashtag nonprofit nuggets podcast have fun.

Hey, have you checked out our website? If you do, you'll see a link to impact basics. It is our six week course to help guide nonprofits through the things that make a difference when explaining your impact. So we're going to talk about your mission, we're going to work through your priorities, some tools for reflecting that impact, and then we're going to dig into storytelling and how you can show your impact in ways that are way more fun. And just looking at the numbers. Super excited. Let me know if you have questions. You can schedule a call. My calendar will be in the notes and we can talk about if this is a good fit for you. Of course, we'll start on January 21st thanks.