Picture it: adding data visualization to your nonprofit financial reporting

Nonprofits must provide reporting for accountability, compliance, and transparency. Unfortunately, for many organizations, delivering accurate, timely reporting is an arduous task. For the past three years, nonprofit finance leaders consistently ranked the “lack of real-time visibility into key metrics and performance” among their top five internal frustrations.¹

Has your finance team struggled to easily and quickly report on key results, trends, and analytics? Time-saving and easy-to-use nonprofit reporting technology helps nonprofits deliver successful programs and compete for funding. Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer is a multi-angle, multi-dimensional analysis tool to help nonprofits explore their organization’s financial and operational data. By visualizing real-time performance data, leaders can quickly spot trends, reduce time to insights and adapt strategic plans to drive better operational and mission success.

In this article, we will discuss why it is important for nonprofit finance leaders to become more data driven, efficient, and strategic. We will review how the right nonprofit accounting software helps leaders move beyond being scorekeepers and gate keepers and instead focus on adding value through strategic analysis and mission acceleration. Finally, we will examine how Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer can help nonprofit organizations gain faster insights and tell their story to internal and external stakeholders with greater impact.

Top four nonprofit reporting challenges

Nonprofits face an array of reporting challenges that can drain leaders’ time and focus. Year after year, the finance team must contend with:

• Stewardship and reporting by funds, grants, and donors
• Compliance with federal regulations and donor restrictions
• Board and executives demanding greater transparency and reporting
• Stakeholders and staff spread across the organization (and possibly around the world) who require real-time access to accurate financial data

Cloud-based nonprofit financial reporting improves insights

If your organization has an outdated accounting system, you probably find it difficult, if not impossible, to accommodate all of the reporting requirements listed above and deliver the information in a timely manner. Organizations benefit from a nonprofit financial reporting tool that is:

• Comprehensive
• Real-time
• Automated
• Accurate
• Easy-to-use

By relying on a modern, cloud nonprofit financial reporting system like Sage Intacct, nonprofits can easily meet their reporting needs. Sage Intacct shortens days or weeks of reporting tasks into just hours or minutes, leaving nonprofit finance leaders with much more time for strategic focus. Adding data visualizations to reporting saves more time by making strategic analysis much easier. Visualizations can be understood at a glance. They are also better at highlighting trends and revealing insights that might otherwise get buried in spreadsheet data.

This prebuilt data visualization illustrates grant revenue by program on the grant manager dashboard.

Add effortless plug-and-play data visualizations to your reporting

The power of at-a-glance data visualizations is undisputed. But for busy nonprofit finance teams, data visualizations also must be easy to use and quick to create. Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer is built directly on the system of record–enabling zero-latency and ensuring the same reliable data security and user permissions already set up in Sage Intacct.

Nonprofits using Sage Intacct nonprofit accounting software can get started with Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer instantly and without needing any IT resources. It is a cloud solution, so there are no implementation costs or server hardware and maintenance required.

Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer speeds time to insights with prebuilt visualizations and the ability to create drag-and-drop custom visualizations in a few clicks. Simply clicking on any of the 200+ prebuilt visuals in the library is the easiest way to incorporate data visualizations into reporting. Because every nonprofit is unique, you can also easily create new custom data visualizations. Choose from over 25 types of visualizations, select your data and apply filters to narrow your focus.

This data visualization analyzes revenue by the type of program services delivered and
examines it across three fiscal years.

Leverage your data to gain predictive analytic insights

Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer provides nonprofits with new ways to discover business insights using visualizations. It can help you understand where you are today and predict where you are heading in the future.

Predictive capabilities in Sage Intacct Visual Explorer can project future trends in your financial data. This type of next-generation nonprofit financial analysis will empower more proactive decision-making. Leaders will be able to steer their organizations more confidently toward maximum mission impact.

This data visualization highlights revenue and expenses over time, including a prediction about future quarters.

Share visualizations internally with your team

Nonprofit finance leaders can help internal stakeholders leverage real-time visual analysis by placing visualizations into the Sage Intacct customizable, role-based dashboards. Dashboards provide quick at-a-glance insights and deep visibility to everyone on the team. Deliver real-time performance and outcomes data at the right time to the right people. Dashboards can contain a mixture of reports, data visualizations, and nonprofit KPIs. Visual dashboards instantly present the big picture and enable users to drill down for more granular levels of detail.

Sage Intacct role-based dashboards can include data visualizations, reports, and
KPI metrics selected for each user’s data needs.

Tell a visual story to stakeholders

Tell a better story for your grantors, funders, donors, and communities when you add visualizations to your organization’s reporting and other communications. Data visualizations can be exported to a number of file formats for external stakeholders. Sage Intacct Visual Explorer offers the ability to add annotations to reports using an innovative “narrate” mode to find and capture insights during the analysis right in line with the reporting. It can also auto-generate slides and spreadsheets. Enhance your storytelling by tailoring the visuals and narration in your presentations for the best demonstration of your organization’s mission impact.

Transform nonprofit financial reporting with data visualizations

Nonprofit finance teams face many reporting and compliance pressures from a variety of internal and external stakeholders. Efficient, accurate financial reporting is table stakes, but today’s nonprofit finance leaders need to go a step further. Data visualizations reveal insights more easily and quickly than spreadsheets. Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer speeds the creation of visualizations, freeing leaders for more focused strategic time and helping them uncover insights to drive mission success.

Download the Secrets to Gaining Real-Time Visibility into Nonprofit Financials e-book for more tips about how to transform nonprofit financial reporting for greater effectiveness and impact.

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1.  Sage Intacct, “2022 Nonprofit Technology Trends Report,” p 13.