Create Your Billing Terms and Conditions Template for NPOs with Ease

Billing terms and conditions template for NPOs

hi everybody I just wanted to say thank you for joining us today to learn a little bit more about financial scan my name is Peter Kramer and I'm a senior associate at nonprofit Finance fund and today we're going to share a little bit more information about why we developed the product Financial scan and how nonprofit leaders are currently using it as well as walk through a demonstration of the report generating process so guar is known widely as a leader in nonprofit data and nff uh we have more than 30 years of experience as a lender and adviser to nonprofits on strategic Finance so this partnership around Financial scan really brings together our respective expertise in an online financial data platform that offers a more comprehensive analysis than is currently widely available elsewhere at the outset it's important to note that Financial scan isn't a replacement for other forms of financial documents such as internals and audited financial statements that might use but it does provide a consistent and comparable standard for analyzing the Financial Health of your nonprofit and engaging stakeholders in a dialogue about your financial performance and needs so bear with me as the slide changes there we go at nonprofit Finance fund and with and developing this with guar we really believe that Financial Health provides a foundation on which healthy nonprofit Enterprises can be built to deliver highquality programs that really reflect an organization's Mission and ultimately provide solutions to individuals and communities in need and good clear financial data leads to better more informed decision-making about how our organizations operate and deliver services so we hope Financial scan will become an industry standard that provides this clear comprehensive data and acts as a guide or along with a guide for interpreting it to help demystify some of the complexities of nonprofit Finance moreover it provides an accessible and common format that allows nonprofit leaders to engage their staff boards and funders in conversations about recent Financial past and future resource needs and we'll see that in just a minute but first why now uh we really believe that the sector lacks a common vocabulary and understanding of what a healthy nonprofit looks like there and there's also a general lack of agreement on what to measure and why those things matter currently there are a number of of um different voices out there that focus on some one-sized fit-all metrics like overhead rather than a broader um look at the different vital signs of nonprofit Financial Health and we want to help Focus nonprofit leaders funders and their advisors on the leading indicators of comprehensive Financial Health and really at the at the end of the day nonprofits need profits in order to survive and thrive so we need a more comprehensive look at an organization's entire Financial picture that includes things uh Beyond uh one size fit-all metrics that include um items like profitability liquidity and the balance sheet and moreover the expertise of the sector often lies in um in really delivering programs and services and engaging deeply with finances is often secondary to that so Financial scan helps to provide a quick clear and accessible analysis that can add some real value in strategic decision-making processes in the midst of so many competing needs on delivering Mission and managing operations and reporting to funders uh as well as the like so a little bit more about financial scan what is it who is it for how do you use it uh it is as I mentioned a data platform that lives on gu star's website and is designed to give a multi-year perspective on nonprofit Financial Health as well as provides the opportunity for a side-by-side analysis with up to five peer organizations it's been designed with a number of audiences in mind putting an analytical filter on publicly available 990 data and as you can see here from the variety of different audence audiences um it's also important to mention that we have two different pricing models for nonprofits we have a 48h hour nonprofit Express Pass which provides access during a 48 hour period to run a financial scan on one organization as well as Unlimited peer searches for comparison and all of that is included in the price of $250 we also have an annual subscription available for $2,500 and that provides unlimited reports during the course of a year and how it works the financial scan automatically pulls data from digitized IRS forms 990 that are available on guars website it's important to note that the financial scan is currently only able to pull dig Iz data from the regular form 990 not the form 990 EZ or 990 PF and that gives us with a universe of organizations available in financial scan of about 250,000 uh nonprofit organizations and I mentioned earlier that that you know organizations are already using Financial scan and since launching back in April uh We've we've embarked on uh a process of getting feedback in and speaking with users about how they're using Financial scan and so you'll see here on this slide um some highlights from those conversations um things like the holistic and accessible presentation of numbers uh using the peer comparison as a method of benchmarking against similar organizations and a mechanism for engaging the board in in financial discussions and one organization told us a little bit more about how they're using the report as you can see here this organization is really using Financial scan as a communication tool the executive directors shared it with their board to revisit recent Financial Dynamics and performance and the organization also uses it to communicate with others like prospective board members um about the organization's track record and why it has been as it has interestingly they've already had the opportunity to make some decisions about needs for an augmented cash Reserve to better manage the cash flow process as a result of looking at Financial scan and this is just one example of how an organization has has already made use of financial scan so before we take an online tour of financial scan let's pause for a moment and look at what's inside the the report it's both an online interface and a PDF report and is organized as you see here on the slide with an organizational dashboard that highlights up to 5 years of key financial Trends and metrics for the organization that's selected this piece is available online and also in the PDF report then we have graphs and explanatory text that drill down on some of the trends and Dynamics um in these different categories that you see expenses revenue profitability balance sheet health and liquidity there's also explanatory text that corresponds with these graphs and offers some questions to prompt discussion this piece of the financial scan is only available in the PDF uh the full PDF report and the last piece is the financial is the peer comparison dashboard which allows an organization to compare with up to five peer nonprofits selected by the user that piece is available in the online interface and also in the PDF report so why don't we go ahead and take a look at Financial scan in action so if you'll bear with me for one moment I'll go ahead and pull that up and we'll walk through a live demonstration so you'll notice first on this this search page that there's a number of different fields which you can use to select an organization if you're running it on yourself you can likely go here to the the keyword section and type in an EIN number or the organization name if we don't know who we're looking for we could search by some of these other criteria as well so I know that we're going to be looking for today uh boys and girls clubs so I'll go ahead and put in that and I'm going to use some of these filters just to show the the different capabilities of a financial scan so we're going to look in Arizona and I'll go ahead and pull up Phoenix so with just a few pieces of information and a click we can go ahead and and find our search results here if the the organization that we were looking for did not pop up to the top like it has here I know I want to use this Boys and Girls Club of Metropolitan phenex we could also filter the results by these different criteria that you see on the right hand side of the page I'm going to select the Boys and Girls Club of Metropolitan Phoenix and doing so will generate the Financial Health dashboard in the online format now when it comes up you'll notice that we've we've organized the Financial Health dashboard ing to five different chapters of analysis that nonprofit Finance fund uses when it when typically looking at an organization's Financial Health up here at the top you'll see some of the Vital Information provided on guar in terms of the mission statement and the address and as we scroll down you'll see the the dashboard is organized by both the income statement and the balance sheet and each of these five chapters that I mentioned ear earlier have scroll over information that gives a little bit more of nff's perspective on what to look for when when analyzing these five years of data you'll see we have five years of of guar 9990 data side by side and we look at different indicators here such as expenses before depreciation its growth rate personnel as that's usually the largest cost uh associated with the nonprofits operations and then in the revenue section we look at revenue on a percentage basis in terms of its sources and as many of you know revenue is not broken out on the form 990 by level of restriction so our total revenue here includes both unrestricted and restricted dollars however when we look at profitability we wanted to portray an unrestricted perspective so to to calculate profitability in a given year we go to the balance sheet and take the end of the year balance of unrestricted net assets and subtract the beginning of the year balance of unrestricted net assets to give a clearer picture of the organization's performance on an unrestricted basis on the balance sheet we look at at different components like cash Investments uh property and Equipment here and then accumulated depreciation which is important for organizations who have facilities we also look at the composition of net assets and down here at the bottom have three different IND indicators of liquidity that include months of cash cash and Investments and months of estimated unrestricted liquid net assets and when we look at months it assumes uh a perspective of how much how long could an organization continue to operate if it only used its cash reserves or its cash in Investments or relied solely on its estimated unrestricted liquid net assets another important feature on the the Financial Health dashboard is the definitions and formulas link right here that shows you not only definitions of key terms but also calculations behind each one of the indicators that you see in the Financial Health dashboard you also have the ability to print just the PDF of this dashboard um separate and apart from the comparables and the full report that we'll get to in just a minute so next in the process of generating the port we'll go ahead and select peer organizations for comparison here I'm going to search Again by Bo and Girls Club and from looking at at uh our group in Phoenix I know that I want to look at at organizations that are somewhat close to the same size so I'm going to say organizations who have expenses of $5 million between $5 million and $10 million and then number of different search results come up and I'm going to go and select five organizations here against which to compare thanks for your patience as I I select the peers and we'll proceed to the comparables analysis now that we've got five different organizations to look at in comparison to the Boys and Girls Club of Phoenix and this is this pure comparison function is where we've heard from a number of nonprofits that there's some real added value from Financial scan in in benchmarking against organizations who are in uh in similar work in a similar geography or in a similar Mission area to just get a sense of what other kinds of choices organizations have made uh how they how their finances are reflected in their form 990 and and get a sense for you know how my organization how the organization selected here um compares to those so at the top of the page you'll notice we have a key for our comparables analysis and the selected organization from Phoenix is highlighted in this gray so you can look down and see our corresponding highlighted organization here in Gray and we have abbreviations for each of the other organizations uh to save space here and and give us an idea of who we're looking at we also have a median value on the far right side um average in the case of Revenue but it it gives a sense of the full group and and what is the median value for that full group so here you'll see many of the same indicators from the Financial Health dashboard but shown in such a way that that you have a side-by-side comparison to understand the different choices and and Dynamics at play for various organizations ing to a geography or a sub sector again the definitions and formulas link is here in case uh a user forgets how we calculate profitability for example and you can print just a single page from um a single page PDF from this comparison analysis as well lastly I'm going to generate the full report and this takes just a few more seconds so if you'll bear with me and as I mentioned earlier you know the benchmark piece as well as the um the communication aspect that we heard from one of our um our nonprofit um organizations Who provided feedback really have been the added value for nonprofit users of financial scan the ability to just look at clear data organized um by those in a comprehensive way um that shows really the full health of an organization instead of relying on one metric um really has been uh a help F aspect for the users of scan all right so it looks like our full report has printed it'll pull up here in PDF form and again the the nonprofit Express Pass option for using Financial scan offers an organization 48 hours to go into Financial scan run the report and um run as many peer organizations as as are um relevant or interesting to you during that 48 hour period all for $250 so here in our PDF report you'll recognize the Financial Health dashboard from the online environment but then we also have uh a number of different graphs here that drill down into um the Dynamics and represent visually over time how the organization has performed ing to these different chapters of expense Revenue profitability balance sheet and liquidity and as I said there's there's narrative here that shares some of nonprofit nonprofit Finance funds perspective on what to look for and and what really matters when when considering something like expenses also down here at the bottom are different questions to help prompt discussion at the board level or among staff um or help engage in a conversation with funders about your resource needs so I'll just flip through a few different graphs here that give a a perspective on the different aspects of Financial Health a note on expenses that we saw earlier you'll notice that we don't show um expenses Broken Out by program General Administration and fundraising um and that's been through our practice here at nonprofit Finance fund um really seeing that that there aren't standards for how to classify those items and so a comparison on those is often not meaningful um so instead we look at at a natural classification of expenses um that you you saw in this earlier graph of expense categories so back to our various graphs you'll recognize many of these these indicators from the dashboard again um but here they're shown visually and again with the The Narrative text that can help prompt some discussion and lastly our indicators gra or our liquidity indicators graph which is Then followed by the comparables analysis and currently the uh the appendix for the report is uh that the definitions and calculations of the all the key terms here in the graph that comes with it as well so hopefully that helps give you an idea of of how to generate a report what it can tell you how folks are already using it and with that we have a few minutes for questions so I'll go ahead and turn it over to Pam thanks Peter um couple of additional questions are rolling in right now um the first few had to do with the peer analysis and I think I can help with this um right now you can compare your nonprofit to up to five peers five is the limit but keep in mind during your if you are using that 48 hour express pass you can run as many peer comparisons as you want So in theory you could run your organization against your first five peers then go ahead and run a different iteration of the report against the next five Etc so you do have some flexibility there to build out your peer comparison profile during your 48 hour uh window um let's talk about uh data freshness here's a question about IRS postings are at least one fiscal year behind how do you measure to the most current period that's a great question and um honestly it's one that we're looking to improve um somewhat creatively so right now uh it can take anywhere from 4 to 14 months from the date that an organization files their official form with the IRS for that data to actually matriculate the guide star and there's a number of reasons for that some are within our control and some are without and one of the biggest ones is obviously the ability to file for extensions and there's some other uh variables in the mix as well so we Define the most current period as the most currently available digitized data that we've got um just as an example some of um 2011 data actually most of 2011 data excuse me should be digitized and available in fins scan here in the next month to month and a half and that's just on average um how things are flowing right now we are embarking on some pilot programs to look at ways to speed that up and expedite that where a nonprofit could actually provide us data directly so stay tuned there's um more to come on that but thank you for that question okay the questions are rolling in now so bear with me I'll try to um consolidate these as best I can um easy data right now we do not include um easy data in the financial scan product that is something we are looking at doing in the future obviously it would require us to retool some of our metrics and formula and data display and um we've not gotten to that yet so we don't have a time estimate on that it's something we are researching um Visa some other priorities and product improvements Pam while you're while you're looking I got a question here directly to to me that asked about um the peer comparison and the question was is that the median value there just for the five peers and the selected organiz organization or is it for all organizations that fall within the selected parameters and the answer is that it the median value is just for the five peers in the selected organization and um you know we we do hope to in the future be able to add a more aggregate comparison of a particular sub sector or um you know selecting key uh key criteria to compare against a larger group but currently the median is just for the five peers and the selected organization cool thanks Peter um a question about looking for peers is there can we look for peers um based on metrics other than financial ones for instance size of Staff or geographic location um Peter can you go back to the uh peer advance search screen please yeah that's a great question the answer is absolutely most of our early adopters so far have been taking advantage of those expense and revenue and asset search Fields however you can also look for peers based on um State keyword as Peter did just typing in Boys and Girls Clubs as well as n code we are looking at a couple of additional fields to include in there one of which might be a number of employees but for now um thanks Peter you can see uh the parameters that you have to work with city state n code and then again those expense revenue and asset parameters can we receive this data in an Excel spreadsheet wonderful question honestly that's probably the top most item on our um list of future enhancements today you cannot but that is something that um we've received overwhelming feedback on and um we recognize it's it's utility and necessity in the future don't have an estimated time on that yet but something we're looking at let's see um $250 yes that is the price for the express pass and again the way that works is you can generate One Financial Health dashboard on your um selected organization and as many different peer comparisons as you would like to um the way the purchase process works I see a question in here about data um for some folks that have vacillated between a form 990 and an EZ and back and forth how can you figure out if we have enough data to run a report um part of the the checkout process we actually ask you to enter organization and we kind of run a pre-screen to be sure that we have enough data on your organization before you buy so the Second Step there you'll get a return based on the organization you select and we'll let you know that yes you've got the green light we can generate a report or we'll let you know that um you know what we don't have five years of data for you but we've got three or four whatever the um situation might be so that's part of the purchase process once you um select your organization for analysis and I think that is it um are you able to do an aggregate report of 74 Affiliates of a national nonprofit um Rebecca and Peter help me out on this one I think the answer is no you could run the report on the parent organization and on the Affiliates if we have information on them um that sort of aggregate reporting would probably be some custom work that NFS could certainly help you out with that's that's correct Pam it's not uh the we' just be able to see the parent organization but um on a customized basis nonprofit Finance fund can run um larger cohort analyses of um of pure organizations yeah thanks pette so feel free to reach out to Peter directly if um that's something that might interest you and I believe that's it we're at 131 we hope this is really just the beginning of a dialogue with everyone and if you have questions after today's session in the next week next month next year feel free to reach out to us directly um if you have product ideas we're starved for those uh product feedback as well so thanks for your time today and um really appreciate you carving out part of your day to spend with us thanks and we'll talk soon thanks everyone