Webinar: Cloud project accounting giving charities full visibility and competitive advantage

WHETHER you define a ‘project’ as a fundraising activity or a big time-limited event, you will be in better control of it if you have accurate, real-time information about what it’s costing and the income it is generating. 

When project accounting is integrated into a cloud-based finance system, managing project financials is simplified. 

Invoices, expense claims, timesheets, and milestone information can be tracked for that project, as can the revenue it is bringing in. That gives you a clear and up-to-date picture of how things are going and whether any action needs to be taken to get a project back on track before it is too late.

Cloud-based project accounting can also give you a competitive advantage. It enables broader teams to work much more closely together; finance can be more informed at the project level, while project resources can be more involved at the financial level. 

Many charities are funded by a host of grants, donations and legacies which need to be ring-fenced for their intended use. Project accounting using cloud finance software like iplicit enables you to easily handle this kind of complexity, without the need for rekeying information and manual spreadsheet work.

The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust

One iplicit customer, The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, looks after 111 nature reserves and is involved in hundreds of conservation projects.

Darren Tiffney, the trust’s director of finance and central services, said:

“Our funding is categorised as ‘restricted’ and ‘unrestricted’, and we need to specify the restriction on certain pots of money to a specific fund. 

“Some charities are funded by just three or four funders, but we have over 100 active funds at any one time. iplicit’s Project Costing area is a good environment to cope with this complexity. It enables us to put in certain restrictions around user accessibility which is useful – so, for example, certain users can only see certain projects and the transactions associated with them.”

Previously, detailed project accounting could involve finding data in a host of different systems before inputting it into a spreadsheet. At best, that old way of doing things means extra work and a significant time lag – but often, the process is so onerous that it’s not done at all, leaving the organisation without a clear picture of how a project is going.

Health Poverty Action

iplicit customer Health Poverty Action is a non-governmental organisation tackling poverty around the world. 

Sandra Tcheumeni Boschet, Head of Finance and Administration said:

“An organisation like ours has to be very accountable to its donors, not only to show that we’re spending their money effectively but often showing how their money is being spent; we do this by relating it to specific projects.

“Understanding our expenditure by territory, project and by the donor are just some of the constant demands placed upon the system. At year-end, the organisation saved six weeks it traditionally spent consolidating its various project balance sheets. Reports telling donors where their money has been spent would previously have taken three weeks, but with iplicit they can be done in less than two days. The timesaving we experience with iplicit is enormous.”

Learn more about Health Poverty Action’s switch from multiple finance software solutions to iplicit.

Free Webinar: Project accounting in the Cloud

iplicit has hosted a webinar to demonstrate how cloud software can cut out countless hours of tedious manual work and put you in proper control of your organisation’s projects.

The webinar shows how true-cloud technology can handle processes that previously required laborious keying-in of data and creating spreadsheets.

It covers:

• The different use cases for project accounting  
• A demo of iplicit’s project accounting functionality:
  • Project overview: milestones, documentation incl. commitments, budgets
  • Project timesheets, expenses, and disbursements
  • Project analysis – live and real time

Catch up with the Project Accounting Webinar