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As of 2016, over 1.5 million organizations have registered with IRS as nonprofits. These nonprofit groups operate in several sectors. Some organizations work with animal care, others with children, and still more with the environment. If you run one of these organizations, you contribute to more than the good of your cause. Nonprofit organizations employ millions of people, contributing over one trillion dollars to the annual US economy. It turns out your work contributes significantly to the entire country. For these reasons, it's essential for nonprofits to have quality finance records. Keeping those records alone can be difficult, which is why grant accountant services are essential for your organization. What does a grant accountant do, you ask? These expert financiers oversee your grant and financial services, as well as compiling and analyzing data. They also help resolve issues of awarding grants. If you don't have a grant accountant, consider getting one today! In this article, we'll explore five benefits they can provide.
1. Grant Accountants Keep Your Costs Low
An accountant for nonprofit organizations performs many functions. However, as you may expect, their primary cost is to keep your costs low.
Non-profits have taken significant hits in the era of COVID. As people lost the ability to go to work, the donations they once gave nonprofits dried up. This caused nonprofits to react in several ways, including firing or laying off several workers.
Some reports demonstrated that charitable donations decreased as much as 6% for the first quarter of 2020. If your organization suffers similar setbacks in the future, or if you haven't yet recovered from COVID instability, an accountant is a godsend.
An expert grant accountant can help your organization manage its finances during these difficult times. In doing so, they streamline your operations and cut out any nonessential costs and implications.
2. Focus Your Efforts Elsewhere
If you run a nonprofit organization, you have a goal that you pursue. You want to improve the lives of a community that needs help. Alternatively, you have a cause you believe in that you want to further.
Unfortunately, if you oversee all your financial decisions, you may not have time to focus your efforts on these aims. Financial issues leave nonprofits feeling exhausted, especially with accounting services.
Since the buck stops with you, you'll have to spend significant time managing your finances. In doing so, you'll lose time and energy trying to handle your money.
What's the solution, you ask? Find relief by contracting a nonprofit accounting expert. This skilled professional can take the stress and responsibility from your shoulders.
In return, you can orient your focus to where you most need it. You can focus solely on advancing your cause while you leave the bookkeeping to accountants. That way, you receive the best financial practices and advice.
3. Nonprofit Accounting Services Save Money in Hiring
When you think about bringing on an accountant, you probably start sweating over the details. How much will you have to pay for their salary? What benefits and coverage will you need to provide?
If that's your primary concern, don't worry! You don't have to hire an in-house accountant to manage your finances. Instead, you can contract outside nonprofit accounting services.
These groups provide you with several benefits that an individual accountant cannot match. For one thing, a contract with such an agency costs less than hiring a full-time salaried employee.
Likewise, you don't have to worry about providing benefits and coverages. Furthermore, you gain access to much more expertise than one accountant can offer.
A single accountant may have excellent training and a wide array of experience. However, if he's the only person your organization works with, you can become pigeonholed. You may get stuck using his practices, which could gradually become out of date.
When you hire an agency, you receive access to the expertise of many professionals. Your grant accountant can consult with several others in his agency to review the best practices for your situation.
4. Answering Questions and Concerns Effectively and Quickly
If you run a nonprofit, at some point, you will face a financial challenge that you won't know how to resolve. Often, this comes in the form of choosing between grant candidates or similar binary choices.
Worse, these issues often have deadlines and time constraints. You have to make the decision quickly, even if you're not sure what's the best choice.
Once again, that's where nonprofit accounting services come in. These services oversee your financial data and provide regular reports on all aspects of your finances.
Armed with this information, you can often make the critical decisions you need in a timely way. This freedom allows you to use your reports and share them with board members and other department heads.
When everybody has access to accurate information, it allows your team to make informed decisions. You help eliminate the chances of error in decision-making as well.
5. Further Protection From Fraud
One of the worst things that happens to nonprofits is in-house fraud. Few things can do so much to damage your cause and harm morale than an employee abusing your finances.
Several different types of fraud exist, from billing fraud to plain old theft. When this happens frequently, people outside of your organization lose trust in you.
First, it helps to learn the warning signs of fraud. These include poorly defined invoices and vendor addresses that correspond to employee residences.
However, for extra assurance, accounting services can provide the expert eyes you need. They streamline and refine your processes to give people fewer ways of abusing the system. This work also makes your audits easier to conduct.
Find Your Grant Accountant Today
A grant accountant can provide you with several financial services to bolster your nonprofit's performance. If you don't yet have an accountant service, consider ours today!
We offer several services, from full charge bookkeeping to controller oversight. If these seem like benefits you could use, contact us today!
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