Nonprofit Planning and Budgeting In the Cloud

By: Sharon Paul

For nonprofit organizations, financial sustainability is built upon the timely review and reporting of financial activities to constituents.

With the increasing need to accurately measure outcomes, rising donor expectations and massive changes in the nonprofit business model, nonprofit organizations can’t afford to use obsolete technologies that can’t provide real-time visibility and insight into their operations, expenses and mission progress.

Budgeting and forecasting are increasingly difficult components for nonprofits because it’s nearly impossible to accurately predict and allocate where all your funding will come from over the course of a year. Having a reliable, scalable system that can help your organization keep track of planning, budgeting and forecasting gives your team a leg up, allowing you to plan and focus on growing your mission more accurately.

NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) allows organizations to quickly adopt world-class planning and budgeting applications offering market-leading functionality across lines of businesses with flexible and customizable deployment options.

Complete Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Solution

NetSuite PBCS is designed to address a wide variety of financial, sales, contractual and operational planning use cases across multiple industries. It’s accessible via web browser or Microsoft Office.

P&B SS1

Integrated, organization-wide planning and budgeting processes using spreadsheets can result in less collaboration, more inefficiency and a greater chance of error. NetSuite PBCS facilitates both organization-wide and departmental planning with modeling capabilities, approval workflows and reporting within one collaborative scalable solution. Sales and operationally driven strategic plans can be linked to long-term and near-term financial plans. The solution uses a powerful calculation engine that can accommodate a wide range of business logic with fast in-memory aggregation, and instant analysis and reporting.

Robust Modelling With Sandboxing and Predictive Analytics

Demand is volatile, costs fluctuate and the business landscape is constantly changing. You can use sophisticated modelling techniques, predictive analytics, multiple “what if” scenarios and rolling forecasts to minimize uncertainty in your organization.

P&B SS2

Connect Users With an Intuitive, Mobile-Ready User Interface

The interface allows users easy access to view plans and reports on the web or their mobile devices. Robust dashboard and report creation capabilities are built-in for streamlined access to information.

Empower Users With Microsoft Office Integration

NetSuite PBCS also offers comprehensive integration with Microsoft Office tools such as Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Word and PowerPoint with Smart View for Office.

Use Excel as the environment for adding custom members on the fly, slicing and dicing data, and ad-hoc modelling. You can also create data grids incorporating Excel formulas and formats. Common planning actions, such as spreading and allocation, are available within planning data grids rendered within Microsoft Excel.

Integrate Planning and Management Reporting Seamlessly

Reports and dashboards that display planned, forecasted and actual data can be created in minutes, and any change made to versions are instantaneously reflected.

P&B SS3

Key Nonprofit Benefits

  • No hardware or IT investments
  • Fully customizable and owned by lines of business
  • Migrate from disconnected planning tools and spreadsheets
  • Work with latest version of the software
  • Multiple environments and global data centers for deployment
  • Low cost and time to implement
  • Customizable to specific organization need

Smart View Benefits

  • Quickly navigate plan versions and details in Excel
  • Full ad-hoc and free form analysis capabilities
  • Report creation in Excel, Word and PowerPoint
  • Data access from multi-dimensional sources
  • Create unique data perspectives for users
  • Dynamically refresh Office documents with a single click
  • Support for highly formatted grids in Microsoft Excel

Need Help?

If you’d like to learn whether NetSuite could be a fit for your nonprofit, contact us online or give us a call at 410.685.5512 to schedule a demo.

Published February 18, 2022

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