NetSuite 2021.1 for NonProfits

There is no doubt that last year’s bushfires and global pandemic were challenging for many nonprofit organisations. In the wake of these events, many Not For Profits have had to contend with operational disruptions caused by changes in how, when, and where they work. Donations have fallen short of their targets, and fundraising events have been cancelled or scaled back.

As the social impact of the crisis has worsened and spread, the ACNC stated a significant number of nonprofit aid organisations reported an increased demand for their services; food banks, mental health services, material aid providers, and homelessness services.

During the pandemic and recent environmental crisis, the nonprofit sector identified six priority areas for improvement:

1. Digital technology,
2. Communication,
3. Finance,
4. Fundraising,
5. Leadership and diversity,
6. Equity and inclusion

Nonprofit organisations are always looking for ways to cut costs, expand programs and offer higher quality customer service and NetSuite ERP for Non-Profit Release 2021.1 Release allows non-profits to do all planning, budgeting and cost control while saving time and money. The new NetSuite ERP release features include:

NetSuite 2021.1 for Non-Profits – Fundraising and Donor recognition

• With the latest NetSuite ERP release for Nonprofits, organisations can now recognise people, companies and groups who help bring in donations. The new feature allows the recognition for multiple constituents to be attached as soft credit recipients on a transaction. This soft credit functionality will enable the precise impact measurement and better visibility of donations.

• New reporting features will help identify donors who have given in the past but haven’t donated recently. This reporting makes it easy to generate a list of lapsed donors. It also shows the transaction recency and frequency of previous gifts from these lapsed donors.

NetSuite 2021.1 for Non-Profits Smart Financials and Operational Automation

• The new expense commitments and budget validation functionality prevents overspending by validating purchase requests against available budgets.
• Having budgeting by segment visibility provides financial clarity. It displays total and available budget, actuals and commitments by grant, programme or department, which gives insight into how incurred expenses and commitments match up with available budget. It also provides functionality to customise reporting when doing multi-year grant budgeting.
• The enhanced balancing segment supports transaction searches to show segment status balancing and enables users to set up notifications for unbalanced transactions or vendor prepayment without an invoice.
• The global bank feeds feature allows for automated importing of bank and credit card data into NetSuite ERP from banks in Asia, Australia and New Zealand through the Bank Feeds SuiteApp. This integration provides greater efficiency and saves user time by automating data imports and reducing manual work, increasing nonprofit accounting efficiency and simplifying the tedious task of manual reconciliations.
• The centralised purchasing and billing feature combines invoice purchases across multi-subsidiary organisations and generates vendor payments from a single location. Ultimately, this helps reduce PO volume and cross-charges, improved spend management, supply planning and boosted efficiencies.
• SuiteApprovals email automation allows a NetSuite ERP user to review, approve or reject transactions on a mobile device by simply clicking on a link in an email. Reviewing and auditing email approval actions is seamless and integrated with the application, creating faster transaction approvals while maintaining complete audit trail visibility.

NetSuite 2021.1 for Non-Profits Project Lifecycle optimisation

• Project managers can now automate purchase initiation directly from projects. Project transaction visibility allows for easy purchase and invoice approval routing. Collaboration efficiencies between Purchasing and Project Management personnel is enhanced, while the simplified UX enables better visibility of the purchase’s impact on progress.
• Project Managers can set expenses limits for each line in a project to adhere to policy, while new automation filters allow for control of policies based on billable line items.