Budgeting is a key activity for nonprofits. To address this need among our large nonprofit client base here in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Boyer & Associates has done a number of things over the years.
Most recently we added BI360 as a budgeting, reporting and planning tool earlier this year. We did the research and learned that BI360 already works with our three existing products and has the option to stay in Excel or publish reports to an easy portal that works well on phones and tablets.
These are the Top Ten things nonprofits like the most about BI360’s budgeting features:
- Your budgeting administrator can tell your budgeters exactly what to do and when. There’s no more chasing down multiple spreadsheets and wondering if people are working on their budgets because you can check and see how far along they are coming.
- Templates exist for personnel, capex, revenue and expense.
- You can easily see what your actual budget was as you enter the budget for each account.
- BI360 works with your existing Dynamics product and can even write straight to the GP, SL or NAV database rather than the data warehouse if you prefer.
- The front end is based on Excel, allowing you to leverage what you already know and like with Excel’s cell references and formulas.
- A simple web portal allows you to access favorite budgets and forecasts easily without having to search.
- BI360 provides an easy method to export your portal’s budget or forecast to Excel in case, for example, you are getting on a plane and want to keep doing your analysis on your tablet or phone.
- This tool works great with either top-down or bottom-up budgeting.
- In the templates section assumptions, such as how FICA is computed for personnel, are easily visible.
- Collaboration and communication are greatly enhanced with commenting and workflow availability during entry and approval processes.
Now you have 10 great reasons, but I’m feeling extra lucky so we’ll go to 13 instead.
- Bi360 has a variety of built-in spread methods.
- You can stop worrying over someone breaking your formulas — they can’t.
- You no longer have to go digging through old emails to support amounts approved in the past (due to comments and workflow).
As you can tell, BI360 has several great features that work well for nonprofit organizations. We are excited to begin a partnership with Solver to offer this budgeting option to our clients. Contact us today to request more information or set up a consultation.
