4 Signs Your Nonprofit Should Move to the Cloud with Dynamics 365 Business Central
Nonprofit organizations are under stiff scrutiny and pressure to deliver results under constrained budgets. Managing transactions across multiple funding sources can be difficult without the right business solutions to consolidate this information. If you’re juggling spreadsheets or relying on tribal knowledge to manage your business, you’re likely letting funds slip through the cracks due to a heavily manual process and human error.
There’s a better way.
With a modern, cloud-based solution you can gain access to the information vital to keep you operating in the green, manage and track grants and donations, and easily generate the board-quality reports you need.
Check out these four signs it’s time you consider moving your nonprofit business to Dynamics 365 Business Central
1) You have limited internal IT resources
Does your IT team feel overwhelmed, asked to do far more than it can handle? Usually, a nonprofit either has an on-location staff, which maintains hardware and software for on-premises software or outsources that job to an external firm. Security and backups are also dependent on those teams. Microsoft Dynamics GP requires multiple updates a year, as well as the management of licenses.
According to Forrester’s Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, on average companies avoid $40,000 in costs compared with previous solutions as a result of migrating to Business Central. Those savings come in the form of license fee and infrastructure reductions, as well as personnel savings.
With Business Central in the cloud, the servers are owned by the contracted provider. You pay on a monthly or annual basis for the use of those servers and related equipment, and that includes maintenance and upgrades, as required. Public clouds like Microsoft Azure have some of the toughest levels of security, and backups are built-in.
This releases your limited IT capacity to focus on more value-added activities for your organization. Most IT pros in a non-profit organization recognize that a true cloud-based solution like Business Central is more efficient and cost-effective.
2) You need better support for remote and dispersed teams
Many organizations migrated to Business Central after teams moved to a work at home model during the COVID pandemic. Post-COVID, organizations recognize that remote access can continue to result in saved labor and greater efficiencies, keeping volunteers and team members out in the field. This also makes required reporting from afar more efficient and accurate.
3) You’re paying a third party to generate reports or you’re manually piecing them together
Nonprofits have complex reporting requirements. If you’re producing reports piecemeal, manually putting together information from different areas of the organization, or if your existing analytics and reporting functionality isn’t fully supporting your needs, Business Central integrated with Power BI is the solution.
The Forrester research found that companies are saving on average $44,000 in third-party reporting spend over three years as a result of migrating to Business Central. In the same report, one of the firms studied said the Dynamics GP solution was “so cumbersome to the organization’s accounting staff” that it paid a third-party firm to generate key reports multiple times a year. With Business Central, the company was able to leverage cloud-based Excel integration, as well as Power BI, to generate its own highly detailed reports. Business Central also broadened the data the company was able to bring in because it breaks down data silos between business functions.
4) You’ve developed workarounds or employ manual processes that are hard to train others on
Tight budgets and limited headcount mean you need to be as productive as possible. Workarounds in GP add up in the form of time spent and increased errors. Software needs to provide greater integration and workflow management to boost productivity. That’s possible with Dynamics 365 Business Central coupled with Tangicloud Fundamentals, which includes industry-specific functionality for nonprofits. That removes the need for you to customize your software for common industry practices.
Forrester found that as a result of implementing Business Central, organizations were able to improve functionality, visibility and access for finance and operations staff, and allowed them to continue growing without needing to hire additional staff. The flow of operations also improved by an average of 8% because of the availability of better tools to execute daily responsibilities. Researchers also found that those organizations used their reclaimed productivity to make other iterative operational improvements.
With Business Central you can bolster operational efficiency, avoid costs and comfortably scale deployments with growth while benefitting from the flexibility of the cloud. Forrester’s analysis demonstrated an ROI of 162% and a payback of less than a year.
On top of the robust out of the box functionality included in Business Central, the integration with Tangicloud provides functionality nonprofits need including:
- Fund accounting
- Advanced General Ledger functionality
- Advanced purchase and payables
- Commitment accounting
- Encumbrance accounting
- Advanced account schedules
- ASU 2016-14, presentation of financial statement of not-for-profit entities
- Multiple trial balance options
Learn more about why so many nonprofits are transitioning from their on-premises solution to Business Central and Tangicloud during our upcoming webinar.
Webinar - Achieving Success: How Technology Is Helping Nonprofits Thrive
Wednesday, June 30, 2-230 p.m. CT
Modern technology is helping businesses achieve their goals faster through streamlined processes, automation, and deeper insights into data. This innovation is particularly important in the nonprofit world where accurate reporting, grant management, and fund accounting are vital to ongoing success. Join Stoneridge Software and our partner Tangicloud as we discuss the path to the cloud for current nonprofits relying on Dynamics GP to manage their finances and operations. During this session we’ll cover:
- Benefits of a true cloud solution for nonprofit and governmental organizations
- Microsoft’s most modern user experience with features and functionality developed specifically to meet the demands of nonprofit and governmental organizations
- Out of the box, self-service, fully formatted reporting available to organizations
If your organization has any of the requirements listed below, you won’t want to miss this important event.
- Fund accounting
- Advanced General Ledger functionality
- Advanced purchase and payables
- Commitment accounting
- Encumbrance accounting
- Advanced account schedules
- ASU 2016-14, presentation of financial statement of not-for-profit entities
- Multiple trial balance options
All webinar attendees quality for a 60% discount on Tangicloud. This offer is not available to the public. Additional restrictions may apply. Reach out to Stoneridge to learn more.
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