Take a Look at Our Unique Hosted Accounting Services

 If I told you and demonstrated that we could provide accounting services that will significantly improve your financial management capacity and give you peace of mind, would you listen? Let me be more specific about the primary capabilities we can provide to nonprofit organizations:

• Meet all generally accepted accounting principles and rules for nonprofit organization financial reporting.
• Institute a system of internal control, satisfying independent auditing standards and mitigating the risk of fraud or inadvertent loss.
• Allow the performance of day-to-day accounting operations with mid-level administrative staff and not require a full-time accountant or bookkeeper.
• Receive oversight, supervision, and training, period-end quality assurance review and closing from a trained financial professional.
• Be ready and confident for the annual external audit.
• Assure continuity of accounting operations when internal staff turnover occurs.
• Receive timely, accurate and relevant financial reports tailored to your specific needs for internal use, the Board, and other stakeholders.
• Know that you have a permanent solution with the option of bringing it in-house and not having to go through a disruptive software conversion.
• Get a full compliment of governance and best practices documentation to achieve accountability and transparency, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
• Have immediate access on an as needed basis to Chief Financial Officer and specialized services.
• Reduce the headache and cost of supporting and managing your IT back office operations.

 If I don’t already have your attention, what if you could get this service at a cost no more than what you are already spending on accounting functions? The cost could even be less when you factor in the increased leverage and productivity from your existing staff, and a significant reduction in some of your IT costs.

 Our viable and dynamic solution is best suited for growing small- and mid-size nonprofit organizations that want to implement best practices, but have limited resources.

Have you heard enough to have a conversation? To learn more about our solution, please contact me by phone, 303-367-1058, or e-mail: lee@asisucceednps.com.  Also, you can register for our monthly Webinar, “Alternate Strategies for Managing Nonprofit Finances”.

Sage Summit Held in Denver

Sage North America’s annual users’ conference was held at the Denver Convention Center from November 17 – 20.  ASI attended, as a Sage Partner, to meet with current and prospective clients, to get a sense of future direction, and to garner some additional product training.

 The Summit is a huge affair that draws users, partners, and vendors from all over the United States and Canada. Several thousand attendees embarked on the Denver Convention Center, a world-class facility. From a pure logistical standpoint, the conference was a success – the events were flawlessly planned and precisely executed. Bruce Jenner, a former Olympian, spoke, and Cirque Du Soleil put on an amazing performance.

 The Sage NPS (nonprofit solutions) group was well represented among its more commercially oriented peers. Sage MIP and Fund Raising software users benefited from strong breakout sessions and specific training opportunities. Here are some highlights from the conference:

• Sage continues to be strongly committed to the not-for-profit market sector. It plans to make technology and functional improvements to the software based on evolving customer requirements and enabling technology.
• While Sage application software is currently client-server oriented that is largely dependent on Windows technology, this will change over the next three to five years. The software will evolve towards being accessible over the Web as a service via a browser. As an important first step in this direction Sage NPS has announced an important hosting initiative, where MIP and FR 50 can be hosted by a managed data center, as an option to running the software on in-house servers. The customer will be charged a monthly fee based on number of concurrent users, ranging from $200 – $500 for typical users. For more information on our plans to integrate hosting and services, please click here.
• Sage MIP Fund Accounting will release version 11.0 in mid-2009. Specific functionality enhancements to expect include: more reporting flexibility and drilldown, scheduling and alerting components, credit card integration, bank reconciliation downloading, more e-mail features, streamlining document attachments, grant administration, and paperless office features. While some will make it into the software, don’t expect to see all of them. Sage also sincerely and actively solicited user suggestions and responses on software improvements during a particularly interesting session.

 The conference was very valuable to representatives from nonprofit and government organizations, who are not intent in staying with the routine, but want to utilize the software as intended and become ‘power users’. Although the $900-per-person price tag was somewhat pricey, it was money well spent, since one implementable idea will quickly recover the cost. The 2009 Summit will be held in Atlanta from November 9 -12, 2009.

Moving to the ‘Cloud’ and Hosted Applications

One of the takeaways from the Sage Summit conference was Sage’s announcement of their hosting initiative that will be publicly announced in mid-December. I feel this is an important first step that is long overdue. The computing world is moving towards software as a service, or some call it ‘cloud computing’. Microsoft is banking its future on providing the software infrastructure and is playing catch-up to Google and other competitors. There is a good article in the latest Wired Magazineabout how Microsoft under the leadership of Ray Ozzie, Bill Gate’s successor as Chief Software Architect, will move to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model in the fairly foreseeable future.

Software vendors such as Sage have much work to do yet in changing to the service business model where application are accessed via a Web browser and the user pays a subscription fee – or rents the application. As an interim but practical solution many Sage applications including MIP Fund Accounting are web-enabled and can be accessed remotely from a central data center, and operate transparently from the users’ perspective. The major differences are that the software application has to be specifically licensed to the end-user and that actual access is through remote desktop services such as Microsoft’s Terminal Service or Citrix XinApp, mature and very reliable technology. So the end-user still has to ‘buy’ the software and have a Windows-based network with a broadband connection to the Internet. The purchase issue can be mitigated using a lease to spread the payments over several years; and let’s face it, desktop prices are already down in the range once paid for dumb terminals. Much of the back office IT infrastructure of servers, databases, security, backup and technical assistance goes away or is greatly diminishes.

Sage has partnered with a managed application hosting center, nGenX to provide the managed application hosting. Through the Sage/nGenX partnership, we can offer accounting system hosting for as little as $190 monthly. We see this as both a business opportunity and a resource to help  not-for-profit organizations increase their internal capacity. Hosting gives us the capability of offer bundled accounting services that incorporates hosted accounting software and expert professional services and differentiate us from most accounting service providers. Under this arrangement, the internal staff performs the bulk of day-to-day accounting operations and we provide the oversight, review, and reporting; and fulfill the Chief Financial Officer role as required in presenting and interpreting financial information for the Executive Director and Board. The client’s accounting system and data reside in a secure hosted environment running the award-winning Sage MIP Fund Accounting software. Using the flexible chart of accounts and reporting features, the application is tailored specifically to the organization’s tracking and reporting requirements, including programs, departments, locations, grants, projects, and restrictions. We provide training and documentation to the internal staff to perform most accounting operational tasks and access information transparently without the investment in additional technology and hiring a professional accountant, Controller or CFO. We ensure an adequate structure of internal control, and provide period-end review, closing, and reporting; and annual audit readiness.

Alternate Strategies for Managing Your Nonprofit’s Finances Webinar

Lee Bengston conducted the first-ever webinar on alternate strategies for managing nonprofit finances on November 18. The training is directed to Executive Directors of growing nonprofit organizations who seek affordable and workable solutions to their financial management issues. Typically these executives proceed along the route of hiring an accountant and hoping for the best without first understanding his or her own responsibility for financial stewardship and acquiring the basic knowledge to effectively manage the function. The webinar explores the various in-house, outsourced, and combination models and evaluates their strengths and weakness; and further introduces a newer, technology-enabled alternate strategy, hosted accounting services from our organization that gets nonprofits on the right track towards fully implementing financial management best practices and a permanent solution.

The webinar addresses the following questions:

·    As the executive head of a nonprofit organization, what is my stewardship responsibility for financial management and what should I know?

·    What are fiscal management best practices and why are they important?

·    Why do conventional financial management organizational strategies fall short?

·    What is an alternate technology-enabled strategy that combines in-house and external resources?

·    How do I evaluate and select a strategy that is right for my organization?

 The webinar represents the first opportunity to preview our newly expanded portfolio of services to nonprofit organizations. While our previous focus was to provide in-house accounting software, notably Sage MIP Fund Accounting, we have designed a more comprehensive and collaborative approach, combining expert external services, training and software tools to implement best practices and achieve financial management success.

 

The webinar utilizes on-line meeting software free teleconferencing. It is scheduled to last for one hour. Each attendee will receive a supporting information packet.

 

Click hereto register. Contact Lee Bengston 303-367-1058, or Lee@asisucceednps.com, if you have any questions.

 

Since the webinar will be presented from a CEO’s perspective, it would not be useful for the financial functional manager (controller, finance director, business manager, etc.) to attend in your place. However, we welcome your financial manager to attend with you.

Going Beyond Accounting Software

As my first post, I hardly know where to begin, but thought it would be useful to convey what my group does and where we would like to go. If you visit our website the orientation is primarily around accounting software products and related services. Without boring you about my background, I was inspired to start my consulting firm late in 2006 as a result of my experience serving as a volunteer, then Board member and Treasurer for two nonprofit organizations and exposure to others. These were representative of many other small- to mid-size nonprofits that need help implementing financial management best practices to build capacity, so I saw an opportunity to prolong my career into my senior citizen years and hopefully make a difference employing my skills and experience.

I wanted to create a unique service concept for nonprofits in the financial management area, one that would actually combine knowledge, resources and tools. I started by offering accounting software and related consulting, probably because that was a extension of what I had done for the last 20 years now re-directed to the nonprofit sector. In restrospect this may have been ‘putting the horse before cart’. Being a software reseller tends to type-cast you as a ‘vendor’, despite other capabilities you can bring to the table. We’ve had some success in selling, implementing, and supporting accounting software, but it has been a slow slog. So, I am getting going back to the original vision, more fully defining it, and changing the business model to make a greater impact.

What I envision is earning the distinction of becoming the ‘go to’ source on all matters relating to nonprofit financial management from the Board to the staff. Software will still be part of the model, but not the main thrust. We want to serve a broader range of needs in the greater Colorado area inlcuding executive-level education, financial staff training, best practices consulting, outsourced accounting and CFO services, human resource sourcing, and being a source for information resources and tools.

Our present dba name of ASI Succeed in Nonprofit Solutions will be changed to something more descriptive, some variation of Nonprofit Financial Management / Business Consultants / Resources / Center. The core organization will consist of myself and Don Gardner. We will add permanent personnel as growth demands, but I plan to tap into a wealth of talented people, such as retiring baby boomer financial professionals, who possess unique skills and share my passion for nonprofit financial management excellence. These people would serve as part-time independent contractors and possibly volunteers for our clients.

I think we are on to something with this idea. There are some individuals and organizations that do pieces of what we are talking about, but not beyond their speciality nor within a broarder context. In fact, I see some as potential resources working in collaboration with us (something that I am pretty good at managing). Admittedly, we are taking ‘build it and they will come’ approach. I have heard the comment that nonprofit executives “Don’t know what they don’t know” and seem oblivious to ever getting beyond that. I have seen evidence of this, but disagree that’s where most are coming from.

In any event, I welcome critical comments and ideas. I am sending a notice out to some of my contacts with the hope they will read my posting, comment and pass the link along to others.