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No matter what a nonprofit’s mission is, it must run like a business. Like other businesses, nonprofits have to pay bills, reconcile accounts, manage payroll, and more. And the stakes often feel high. After all, if an organization fails to bring in more donations or grants than they spend, it puts its mission at risk.
Accounting firms can bring efficiency, valuable advice, and best practices to their nonprofit and religious institution clients, solving critical problems and helping to ensure others don’t arise. They can help guide them into a next-generation approach to spend and expense management—one that can bring in new sources of cash, real-time visibility into their spend, and the ability to enforce budgets via spend management.
Even more importantly, they can help their nonprofit clients better meet their responsibilities to their donors and the government. Nonprofits typically undergo regular audits and demonstrate transparency via reporting. Accounting firms, with their experience in both the industry and technology, can vastly streamline and improve those processes.
Challenges of nonprofit spend and expense management
Some common obstacles your nonprofit and church clients may face when it comes to spend and expense management include:
- Card sharing: Nonprofits and churches may often share charge cards, giving them little control over what will be spent and opening them up to the potential of fraud.
- Lack of resources or high costs around labor: If a nonprofit is handling expenses in-house and on paper with no automation, it is a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone endeavor.
- Lack of visibility into spend and slow closes: After-the-fact expense management means nonprofits don’t have real-time visibility into spend and difficulties closing the books in a timely manner.
The new expense management for nonprofits: Spend management
As an accounting professional, you have a unique opportunity to help your nonprofit clients by introducing them to spend management.
While the terms “expense management” and “spend management” are often used interchangeably, they refer to two separate ideas.
Expense management focuses on capturing and processing expenses after-the-fact. It’s the traditional approach of incurring expenses, receiving reports and requests for reimbursement, reaching out for receipts and other documentation, and more. And it contributes to the challenges discussed above.
Spend management converts expense management into a proactive discipline. Broadly defined, spend management is the ability to view, control, and manage a business’s cashflows in real-time and in one centralized location, providing actionable insights to key financial decision-makers. It introduces business credit and proactive budget enforcement into the expense process.
This structure enables better control over all spending—including expenses—while giving employees a moresecure way to purchase on behalf of the nonprofits.
How BILL Spend & Expense looks in a nonprofit environment
With a corporate card-based spend and expense management approach to expense management provided by Divvy, you start with pre-funded budgets. You or your client can issue charge or virtual cards to employees from your spend management dashboard. Each card is connected to a specific budget (or budgets, depending on the employee) and has limits you set based on the card holder, project, or budget (or all). Once that limit has been reached, the card can no longer purchase without approval. Your client’s employees do not need to spend out of pocket.
For example, Joy, an employee at your client’s church, is purchasing refreshments for a meeting. The client can limit her spend to the approved amount on her BILL Divvy corporate card. She visits the grocery store and buys the items. As soon as she uses that card, the BILL Spend & Expense app asks her to upload the receipt. If the expense isn’t precoded already, she can add that at the same time.
As soon as she makes that charge, you and your client can see it in real-time on the spend management dashboard, and it is already coded and documented.
But wait—she needs to purchase decorations as well. She can request more budget via the BILL Spend & Expense app, which can be approved or denied online within minutes by the budget manager.
There’s no sharing of credit cards or exchanging of cash. Even more importantly, this approach enforces budgets and expense guidelines, helping nonprofits control spend.
“My clients love Spend & Expense. They tell me, ‘Spend & Expense is the biggest game-changer you’ve added in a long time.” - Steve Chaney, Owner of Chaney & Associates
New benefits for your nonprofit clients
In addition to helping with budget compliance, your clients will discover other BILL Spend & Expense benefits that will support their organizations.
- Cash-back rewards: Nonprofits always welcome new sources of cash, and you can set them up for BILL Spend & Expense cash-back rewards. Instead of rewards being tied to different types of cards and their card holders, all spend is combined. This goes beyond just expenses. Imagine getting cash-back rewards based on advertising, events, supplies, software subscriptions, services, and more.*
- Audit-ready results: Nonprofits must have sterling records and bookkeeping to maintain trust with donors. BILL Spend & Expense provides a level of transparency that makes audits even easier, including capturing each charge in real-time, along with who spent it, when it was spent, coding, and receipts.
- Limiting the chances of fraud: Since you and your client can control who receives charge cards, how much they can spend, and the limits as needed, you can help reduce the chances for fraud. Instead of sharing cards, an employee can be issued a virtual or physical card that tracks solely to them and their allotted spend. Likewise, BILL Divvy corporate cards can be deactivated quickly from the spend management dashboard.
- Closer to a continuous close: Spend management automation means your client’s expense data is populated and reportable on demand. You no longer have to wait for expense reports to be submitted and code and enter data after-the-fact. Plus, integrations with Quickbooks Online, Sage Intacct, and Oracle NetSuite ensure systems are synced and accurate, while reducing duplicative data entry.
- Staying within budgets: This cannot be said enough. Each BILL Divvy Corporate Card is tied to a specific budget or set of budgets and spending is limited to within those boundaries, helping your clients control spend.
- Reducing resources: Automation and mobility reduces the amount of time needed to handle expenses, without sacrificing convenience and visibility. Plus BILL Spend & Expense software is free-to-use, making it accessible cost-wise to your clients where every cent counts.
And a big benefit for accounting firms
Even more importantly for accounting firms, BILL Spend & Expense opens up the opportunity to build stronger ties with your nonprofit clients while expanding your services to include spend and expense management.
BILL’s automation means far less manual work for your firm and reduces the need to spend money on staff to cover spend management for your clients. It also means you can offer expense management services to nonprofits at a lower price or as part of their overall package. This results in a win/win: Your nonprofit and church clients will not incur too much undue stress on the nonprofit's budget and your firm can open a new revenue stream.
Start with spend and expense management for nonprofits now
Ready to explore BILL Spend & Expense for your nonprofit clients? Learn more or reach out to your account manager.
