Easy Office Blog

Enjoy this 55 minute webinar, followed by 10 minutes of Q&A, delivered by Jeff Russell, CEO of Easy Office.  GIves a succinct overview of all facets for successful nonprofit accounting and bookkeeping.  Includes discussions on nonprofit specific rules and an overview of the required people, processes, and systems required to manage your financial information.   Let us know what you think!

Good article from Kate Barr and Jeanne Bell of CompassPoint on Financial Leadership.  In particular, we like the section where they say:

Invest in contract consultants. So how does an organization with limited resources adequately attend to all three finance functions? Increasingly, we are seeing executives pair contract consultants with staff in the finance function. ...... This way, the executive has a strategic financial partner without creating a fixed staffing cost that she can’t afford. Board members, including the treasurer, have a role that is distinct from the staff finance team. The executive needs an uncomplicated relationship to her finance team so that she can direct them in developing the analysis and reporting she needs as the organization’s financial leader.

Outsourcing can be a key way to develop capacity around your nonprofits finances.  It is a trend we see growing in increasing acceptance.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy is reporting another sad story of non-profit fraud.  The struggling Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, CT has been fighting insolvency for some time.  Now, to add to their woes, their controller for the past 20 years has admitted to systematically stealing over $1 million from the organization over the past decade.

She used a common trick - ghost employees.  For those of us in the sector who have seasonal workers, or a large part-time staff, ghost employees can be a real problem.  They are very common on farms and in agricultural situations.  The bookkeeper simply "invents" an employee and pays them.  Management often doesn't notice as payroll gets entered into the accounting system in a lump sum.

There are several things you can do to avoid this.  However the most imporant is that a pre-payroll register should be approved and signed - and not necessarily by the Executive Director who may be too far removed from the details to sign appropriately.  Payroll should be broken into chunks by department by person; so that the people and amounts can be meaningfully looked at and approved.

There is more good than bad in our sector, but it always pays to keep your eyes open and your systems water-tight.