Category: Cloud

Transparent Nonprofits

7/30/2018

8 Ways Nonprofits Can Be Financially Transparent

Businessman Simon Mainwaring once said, “The keys to brand success are self-definition, transparency, authenticity and accountability.” Transparency and accountability, in particular, are essential to a nonprofit achieving mission success.

In fact, these two principles are foundational to the rating system used by Charity Navigator, the nation's largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities. Charity Navigator offers these two definitions:

Accountability is an obligation or willingness by a charity to explain its actions to its stakeholders.

Transparency is an obligation or willingness by a charity to publish and make available critical data about the organization.

How to show accountability and transparency
The willingness to be accountable and transparent about your nonprofit — especially finances — creates an environment of trust that encourages donations. Financial transparency and accountability are also essential for legal compliance.

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The National Council of Nonprofits lists several ways your nonprofit can - and in some cases, must - demonstrate financial transparency:

If requested, provide copies of the three most recently filed annual information returns (IRS Form 990) and your organization’s application for tax-exemption. These can be posted on your website.
Be honest in your solicitation materials and in communications with donors about how their gifts will be or have been used.
Adopt a conflict of interest policy with a disclosure statement that your Board and staff must create an executive compensation policy that ensures the Board is aware of, and approves, the salary and benefits of your Executive Director or CEO.
Have the Board of Directors review important financial reports as well as review the IRS Form 990 before filing.
Adhere to sound financial management policies, including internal controls. This ensures accountability.
Adopt an expense reimbursement policy that requires prior approval and limits expenditures to a reasonable limit.
Publish information about your nonprofit’s tax-exempt status, who’s on your Board of Directors, and appropriate financial information on the website.
Simplify financial transparency with cloud software.

Nonprofits face significant challenges as a result of thin staffing, tight budgets, primitive financial management tools (e.g., spreadsheets), and far-flung management teams. Financial transparency may seem almost impossible.

Fortunately, there’s cloud-based fund accounting software from Sage Intacct. Now you can create greater levels of transparency across every dimension of your organization and get real-time visibility into your organization’s financial health. Key stakeholders like the Board of Directors have instant, actionable insight to make smart decisions about your nonprofit’s future.

Let Leaf Software Solutions guide you to greater financial transparency and accountability. By focusing on your business needs first, so we can design a solution that scales as your nonprofit grows. Call us at 317-814-8000, or email us to get started today.

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Tech-Savvy CFO

4/20/2018

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5 Ways to Be a Tech-Savvy CFO

The role of the CFO is changing fast. Customers, the board, your finance team, your stakeholders within the firm, and—most of all—technology is driving this change. Of course, change is rarely easy, even if it’s entirely worthwhile. In this case, technology is both the source of your challenge and the solution you need.

Today, it takes a tech-savvy CFO—someone who understands and embraces the promise and power of technology—to navigate this exciting but sometimes uncertain future. A tech-savvy CFO seeks to modernize and transform the company’s business systems (and IT infrastructure) to boost staff productivity and give the company flexibility for the future. Even if you are in the process of becoming tech savvy, in today’s landscape, an effective CFO must have knowledge of how technology will positively impact your company.

Here are five ways the tech-savvy CFO uses technology to get ahead and stay ahead.

1. Embrace automation. Technology powers the new tools and processes you need to transform your organization, while keeping pace with rapid growth. As you put that technology to work, you will see the results in your company’s performance. For example, you can add financial controls that ensure compliance and auditability. Automation enables rock-solid accounting and bullet-proof record-keeping—allowing your company to move faster, without fear.

2. Gain visibility. Where can you accelerate your business? How can you eliminate risk? Are you seeing your data in real-time? The sooner you know, the faster you can act on the really big opportunities in front of your business. To truly understand the nature of your business, you need to leverage a single source of truth. Your teams become empowered to dig deeper, and you can move faster toward bigger growth.

3. Look to the cloud. It’s time to invigorate your organization with the cost efficiencies and freedom of the cloud. After all, the safe bet of on-premises systems has become a bust. Slow innovation delivery and nightmare implementation cycles have shown there is just no future in the old way of doing things. Today’s cloud solutions, such as Sage Intacct’s best-in-class financial management software, deliver greater productivity, lower TCO, and better security.

4. Empower the next level of growth with agility. Top-performing organizations must constantly evaluate operations to make the right strategic investments. You need the flexibility to address the shifts in your business as they occur. The decisions you make today will become the competitive advantages of tomorrow.

5. Collaborate with confidence across your entire company. Departmental silos suppress collaboration and productivity. And that challenge compounds as your business grows. Why stay constrained by the old ways of isolated decision-making and missed information, when you can achieve your best results by working together? The tech-savvy CFO uses technology to streamline processes and leverage the power of the team.

Transform your technology with Leaf Software Solutions
Tech-savvy CFOs know and understand the power of harnessing technology to quickly grow their business. They also know that the details of implementing a transformative solution are best left to the experts. Leaf Software Solutions combines more than 30 years of software application development with the latest technology to create a custom solution that can accelerate your company’s growth.

You can’t afford to be left behind. Contact us today to start your journey to becoming the tech-savvy CFO your company’s future demands.

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Amazon Web Services Chicago Summit 2017

8/10/2017

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Last month Leaf’s Cloud Services team headed up to Chicago for the AWS Summit. Amazon Web Services holds these free summits in many cities around the world. They are a great opportunity for beginners and experienced users alike to network and learn more about the platform. They even provide the chance to take certification exams (which reminded us that we need to keep our Solutions Architect certifications up to date!).

This year it was clear that microservices are taking over. The longest lines were for sessions detailing how to run microservices on Docker or on how to implement them with Serverless techniques using AWS Lambda. The concept of breaking larger applications into smaller services is not new, but with the public descriptions of Service Oriented Architectures like those of AWS and Netflix, it is widely used. We're particularly interested in the organizational benefits of assigning small teams to building and supporting tightly-scoped, loosely coupled services.

An event like this is also a good opportunity to check in with services that have existed for a long time to stay current on new features. A good example of these are AWS Storage Gateway and Elastic Filesystem which have both seen further development since their initial launch. A service that impressed us thoroughly is Aurora: Amazon's enterprise-grade MySQL-compatible database engine. It shows how effectively AWS can squeeze out performance and reliability improvements when they are in control of the whole infrastructure stack. Several of our clients use Aurora, and it is good to see that this will pay dividends as we inherit regular improvements from Amazon's continued development.

Another thing that struck us was the theme of Adrian Cockcroft’s keynote: public cloud providers have moved beyond allowing you to do the same things you did in your datacenter and are now providing capabilities that would be nearly impossible without massive investments in capital and talent. Take this example: CSPAN is annotating all of its video coverage of US politics by sampling frames and running them through Amazon Rekognition to detect the faces of politicians.

It’s obvious that cloud computing has moved beyond the startups. All major enterprises are making use of some form of cloud services and many are “all in”. The uncertainty and fear of moving workloads from your own bespoke data center to a cloud provider is a throwback to the last decade. How are we so sure? Consider this: McDonalds’ global Point of Sale system runs entirely on Amazon Web Services.

But its not easy to get started. There is a rapidly growing list of services to learn in AWS alone, not to mention the other major providers like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Most of the vendors in the summit exhibit hall were involved in managing, monitoring, securing, or migrating cloud applications. You don't have to navigate this ecosystem alone. Leaf's Cloud Services team would love the opportunity to help!

Images Credit: https://aws.amazon.com/summits/chicago/