Non profit Accounting: Your Dream Job!
Do you work with a visionary, maybe one who founded your not-for-profit? You know the kind of person I mean: he is passionate about ending the exploitation of forests, she is determined to bring health services to poor immigrants. They are committed to achieving their goals; they are focused, persuasive, and charismatic.
Accounting seems like an afterthought for many of them. Yet there are founding executives who understand what good accounting and financial reporting can do to support them in realizing their vision, and I’ve had the privilege to work with a few. Following are some characteristics of strong working relationships between program-oriented leaders and nonprofit finance managers.
The founding visionary has an appreciation for systems. She understands and supports you in getting good internal controls in place and in testing them periodically. He realizes that capturing complete information about transactions as soon as they occur helps make everyone more efficient, since they spend less time chasing down missing information or correcting transactions that were entered into the accounting system incorrectly.
The visionary founder understands that reliable reports are built on lots of data and supports your efforts to catch errors early in the process. All entries - accounts payable and accounts receivable, as well as general and adjusting journal - are proofed and corrected before they are entered into the accounting system.
The visionary executive director wants you to be a part of management team meetings because she knows that when you’re involved in or aware of decisions about program progress, new strategies, fundraising activities, and plans for the future, you can serve the organization much better than you can when you have to rely on others’ reports.
The visionary nonprofit executive director supports you in spending the time it takes to design systems that will capture transactions at the grant level because he cares about accurate reporting to grantors or contract-funders. He will also support you by being willing to spend a little money so you can get the consulting help and the training you?ll need for yourself and your staff. And he is interested in increasing his skill at reading and understanding the monthly reports you prepare.
Many not-for-profit organizations I’ve worked with have cultures that are primarily reactive (as opposed to proactive), which contributes to increased stress at work. Accountants can begin to shift the organizational culture toward the proactive, creating a healthier work environment as they set up systems and stick to them. For example, to change the expectation that you will cut a check any time someone asks, you can institute a policy of cutting checks one day a week, and then turn down requests to provide them on any other day. Or you can require that employee requests for reimbursement be submitted by a certain time after month-end and refuse reimbursement of any costs that are turned in late. Executive directors who support you in this effort, even when employees grumble about it, are real gems.
If you work for someone like this, be grateful. If your working relationship isn’t quite this rosy, you can try to improve it. Try suggesting that you be included in meetings. Suggest one-on-ones with the visionary where you can demonstrate what “the numbers” tell you about the organization’s health and success. Learn how to graph in Excel to convey your message in a new way. With patience and a willingness to experiment, you may just create your own dream job.
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