Tips for Organizations

• Create opportunities for your staff members to improve and broaden their level of expertise and skills to perform the complete spectrum of financial activities they need to do.
• Ensure your financial software is up to date and that staff are trained to use it. This can help automate many essential financial management functions and generate accurate and reliable financial information.
• Put systems and practices in place to ensure that organization-wide and individual program budgets reflect true and full costs of operations.
• Communicate important financial information with program staff and others in the organization. 
• Generate financial projects that are frequent enough and projected out far enough to help predict and plan for cash shortfalls.

Tips for Funders

Public and private funders can consider the following reforms: 

• Invest in nonprofits’ core administrative infrastructure, especially financial management. 
• Help nonprofits reduce administrative and financial burdens that result from current funding practices. 
• Invest in financial-management capacity building among both nonprofit staff and the tools they use for financial planning.

For more hands-on tools and resources to help you improve your organization's financial management see the StrongNonprofits toolkit.