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Fillable commercial invoice for non-profit organizations

good morning everyone and welcome to today's webinar i have mark harris and joe sutton joining us today if i could just go through a little bit of housekeeping with you there is a chat feature on this webinar which enables you to ask any questions throughout the session so please do interact with us as much as possible we are recording the session and this will be available to you following the webinar today and we'll send a copy out to you which you can share so just a quick introduction um before we start this session about who enbridge actually is some of you will be aware of us um we've worked with a number of technology partners including unit 4 and x ledger and proactus so you may have seen us at some of the events that they usually hold each year if you haven't then we are a boutique solution provider we have experience and the ability to deliver a number of finance and erp solutions across a wide range of organizations including not-for-profit we've worked with very small uk charities right up to large global organizations and help them to address the the unique challenges that you all face on a day-to-day basis so that brings us to our very first webinar for the not-for-profit sector and i want to introduce my colleagues who will take you through our topic today restricted funds reporting and some of the challenges non-profit organizations face to get it right without further ado i'm going to hand over to my colleague mark who will take you through the next part of this session mark thank you very much tracy and good afternoon and welcome to everyone and hi joe uh nice to have a chat to you like myself you've worked with a number of charities over the years and i've been very fortunate to uh to have done that what i have noticed recently though in the face of this pandemic is the serious amount of work that and demand on their services that they're facing and the way that they're having to be more innovative and more adaptable i'd just like to take your view on the sort of problems you've seen uh facing charities and how they manage this in the back office yes mark you're right things have been really quite different the pandemic and and it's been interesting because it's brought to a four the sort of challenges which were probably there anyway but somehow with the pandemic we've been forced to address them and um in order to be able to carry on operating and it's really highlighted some of the challenges that otherwise we you know thought we'd save plenty of time and and with the experience i've had over the last couple of years i think there are probably three main areas that i would highlight the first is obviously it's the technical one so we're very used to to some extent just making do with the old software so i've come across a couple of organizations where they're using older technologies it might be older versions of software that's no longer in support or it might be running a version of the software on a machine which is in premise and it's a bit creaky and it's the only thing that's run on that machine it's just kept in the corner in the office or it might be that it's other challenges to do with uh inability to upgrade because of an old operating system so all sorts of technical um blockers which suddenly had to be overcome because of the pandemic with people being forced to say well actually how do we want to work we want to be able to access our system from anywhere we want to be able to to be on the latest technology and take advantage of the latest tools um and it's just as important for the back office administrative systems as the front office services but everybody had to adapt so yeah that was been a big problem um i think probably the second element is also related to the first in terms of how finance has had to be able to react to support the rest of the organization and it's it's just a traditional finance department you report your months figures three weeks into the next month and you always wish it could be quicker but actually the reason for it being quicker has become absolutely paramount in the last couple of years and so uni charities in particular have had to respond very agilely and very quickly to changes and change circumstances and different ways of delivering services and the finance department has to support that so and that's we've talked about the concept before as a proactive business partner that's become a much more significant part of the way that they've been helping their front office services so the the audience expands budget holders need to know actually up-to-date information about how their expenditure matches against their budget and need to be able to interact very quickly with systems you haven't got the um the benefit of being able to approve invoices by somebody walking across your desk with a paper version of the invoice it has to be done or even better than email done electronically maybe on a mobile device because you're actually sat at home trying to to manage all this extra work and and that whole kind of efficiency and understanding of the numbers and being proactive and as i said agile in the way that you can operate has been a real focus um and has been something that's been discussed previously and then the third area is where we kind of link into the subject of this interview in the first place which is the complexities of reporting so it's not just a case of being able to report on your actuals against budget but actually being able to take that information and use it in a meaningful way for all the different stakeholders and it's particularly the challenge of the funds reporting where you're looking at reporting to your funders that you're still providing the service do you need any adjustment to the funding that you've requested how's the project going against the original plan obviously that's had to change because of the immediate changes to do with the pandemic but the requirements and the services needed are the same and the goals and the out uh the impacts that you're trying to have with that service all that would have stayed the same but you're just removing your goal posts within that and for the from the funding point of view the funding might come in more slowly or might have stopped or there might be additional funding available and what are the services that need to go with that and still again moving quickly to be able to prove that the funds you're spending on a particular project are actually covering the cost of that project and the part of the charity unrestricted element of the charitable organization the unrestricted funding is that still enough to be able to support the projects and the bids and the infrastructure and can the um can the organization support new initiatives and still running the back office functions in the same way so i suppose those are the probably the three highlights through three main threads there are of course many other issues i could talk about and we've got the challenge of partially exemplary 80 of things like accounting for gift aid accurate forecasting and we could go on for a long time but maybe subjects for a different conversation no you're right joe i think that the sector actually has some very unique challenges in the way it has to account and report i mean in terms of the restricted funds reporting but why is that so tricky joe it's tricky and i forgive me if i sound a bit like a data analyst but it's tricky because every financial transaction has to be linked with a lot of different elements for analysis and in the finance world we used to be a being asked to record information by nominal code or subjective so you know is it stationary is it utilities is it printing that sort of thing and we're very used to reporting by departments or cost centers so is it expenditure from finance from hr from fundraising from service provisions but actually charity work is much more complex because you you're looking at these extra levels of slicing the data you're looking at also tracking what project is this expenditure associated with what's the income that comes with that project and what's the expenditure for that project and then the layer on top of that which is the funds reporting is how is that project actually funded sometimes it's one to one sometimes there's one funder per project in which case it's not so complex but in many organizations you're looking at shared funding for a particular project it might be that you're getting some of the funding from them from the local council and some of it from a research organization or you might be doing fundraising for some of it and do matching funding but you've always got to have all the time this idea of the fund has been donated or provided and you have to report back on the project or projects and the expenditure and how that is being is being brought pulled down from the from the fund and so it's complex because you have to record the information accurately that means stamping the transaction with all that information and then reporting on that information in multi-dimensions as well and reporting you can you know get a list of transactions but actually you're looking at turning the reports on their side so that in order to meet the charity sofa and soap requirements you're able to report all those dimensions at the same time so typically you're reporting your income based on the different income streams your activities based on the projects which in data analysis terms is another field and you're splitting it always by restricted and unrestricted funds so data wise it's complex and system-wise it's complex but for anyone understanding how the charity's doing it's absolutely key um i was and if i may just a little bit underlying that as well it's also the benefit that you get from this information so it isn't just the ongoing transaction history but how do you use it then in the future so if you've got accurate information about historical expenditure on projects you can be sure that the next time you go for funding you stand a better chance of getting the funding to cover your costs oh you're absolutely right john and before any of the audience accuses of kind of telling them what they already know i think it's quite important if we can actually outline how we can help them overcome some of these these major problems and avoid it all being complex off-record spreadsheets that only one person in the business understands so how exactly can we help people joe the what we do as enbridge is we always take a holistic approach to how we're um addressing these types of challenge so we look at not just the technology but we also look at how we can implement solutions how we can help an organization understand their data how they can transition from one system to another how they can help their people adapt to the change in the most effective way so we always talk about um the technology the people and the processes when we're approaching a project and it's not a a one-off task so you you've got the challenge of how how do you um configure a system and how do you change your finance processes in order to be able to capture the data but you've also got on an ongoing basis how do you make sure that you're always delivering continuous improvement particularly from for a charity where you're um you're under pressure to keep your administration costs down and prove a that the investment in any sort of system and change is enabling you to free up funds to help your your front of line services um i don't know i've got a few examples if you think that that would be of interest yeah i think so yeah please um so i was trying to think of like the different size of organization we've worked with so one of the larger international company customers that we've been involved with for example who was involved in delivering aid projects across the world so they introduced a financial solution which would give them the accurate project cost exactly as we're talking about so you've got the slicing and dicing for their funders but one of the their important requirements as well was also to analyze the outcomes of each of their projects so they actually had an extra dimension in their reporting not just looking at the um at the are we spending the money in the right way but what is the outcome as a result of our work and added those extra kpis to their to their reporting um an example would be a project building schools in um in africa how many schools were built as a result of the project and keeping track of that over time another example the um this is also an international charity that we worked with recently expanding rapidly in the environmental field and so an area where there's a lot of interest and a lot of investment when we started working with them they were doing a lot of their reporting in spreadsheets they were you know as as we talked about at the beginning reporting very much after the event in the month following um their project managers were not in the way of working or being able to to use the numbers to help them with their bids and their deliverables and so on and as a result of the work we did with them we changed the way the organization was able to help their project managers very much building finance as a business partner getting access to up-to-date projects and funding information being able to report to funders being able to really understand how the organization was was placed to be able to carry on operating so the split between the restricted funds and the unrestricted funds that were available then to to keep the organization going and another another layer as well if i may sort of third example probably the most complex one that i've been involved with over the last few years is with a federated charity and that's where you've got a a central organization looking after almost like subsidiary charities within their umbrella organization so they work in a very similar way but they're not under the control and there you've got we you really have the the challenge of matching the statutory and the organizational requirements with the local nuances and their own particular way of working and services and so on that they have to deliver and so there we've helped with building a template a pre-built template and and pre-built templates is something that we use very commonly in enbridge as part of our methodology for helping organizations to sort of build on uh best practice but with this organization we did a pre-built template we include extended it from our normal not-for-profit to include specific requirements for that organization which was their specific integrations that they were using their payment systems i think and epos that they were linked up with so they've got like a tailored version which they can roll out to the other charities within their ecosystem so from the top point of view they can get an overview of all the different parts of the organization but each individual charity has independent access to be able to report they're restricted and their unrestricted funds their projects their and against their budgets that one i say that one was one of the most complex because they also took the decision to do funds reporting not just in the income of an expenditure statement but also right across the balance sheet so they can do a trial balance actually by fund okay thanks joe thank you yeah thank you thank you for that session um we do actually have a number of questions that have come through on the chat so thank you very much for that if you've got any more please send them through mark did you have anything more to add to to joe's session at all i think that was a really good summary i think um one of the one of the points i would add and joe's sort of touched on it there in in terms of you know not just being able to have that audit trail of where the money came from and how it was spent and measuring outcomes the power of that going back to donors you can then start to when you're bidding use the same capability to actually put your bids for funds together and use similar projects where you've got that measured outcome and the success as evidenced because it's fully audit trailed and therefore fully demonstrable when you're bidding for funds for new projects because as sure as anything going forward getting funds is becoming harder and harder for charities and the charities that are able to prove their outcomes and prove that they have systems that track that and are auditable will actually be the ones that rise to the top when the the funds are allocated so it's a case of really having that entire governance in place that allows you to even perform better as a charity and and win the more more funding that you need for yours because we're just going to see more and more charities setting up and competing for that limited and restricted pot so i think that was quite a useful picture you painted joe thank you thank you yeah thank you mark so let's uh head across to to the questions um how easy is it to change systems that's quite a tough wide-ranging question there joe okay how easy is it to change systems um obviously this is one of these it depends sort of piece of string um how long is a piece of string questions it's um it's something that you if you've done it like enbridge have done it so many times i think it becomes a predictable number of steps that you have to go through to move from one system to another and the the approach can always be be managed so when you're changing systems keep in mind very much what the goals are that you're trying to achieve by changing the system make sure that the people that are involved are the decision makers make sure you understand the benefits and then use experts to help you take the your business processes from where you are now to where you want to go um the biggest challenge is what do you do with the old data and how much can you use that going forward and that will be be one of those questions how much analysis were you capturing before and how much do you want to take with you into the new system so you know it's not trivial and i wouldn't like to say it is but it's absolutely doable and when you get to the point where you realize that you need to change systems just do it excellent thanks thanks joe and of course i'd just like to add a point to that if i may tracy actually yeah please mark um we have what we call an industry model which is a kind of best process what we've seen other charities do pre-built pre-configured so a lot of sort of things like this the standard charity reports and the legislatively legislative reports that you need to do are there ready for you so it's just nuancing various bits of the system rather than starting from a blank piece of paper and expecting you as an organization to design a system we come to you with the expertise that's not been from us but it's been from other charities we've worked it telling us this is how we like to do things this is the best way for us to do that so you really do get a really solid platform to start with that can shorten the time frame and shorten the pain of changing that system as well okay thanks mark now i think we have very similar questions here from two different people so how do you manage recovery and accounting for overheads and uplifts always a challenge the um as a as an organization i think you you've got to accept that you can't operate without some sort of help from a back office and whether that is the um the premises or the support or the um the expertise or the back background research there's a certain amount of overheads always associated with each individual project how do you make sure that those are incorporated into the bids that you're pushing forward to win the different projects and i've seen various different ways of doing it um one of the charities i've been working with most recently has taken a very um systematic approach to that and said well we know that for each um each front of our front service provider there is a certain amount of overhead percentage that needs to go with that person to be able to make sure they can operate efficiently and so what we we've done there is we've taken the overhead pot and split it ing to a fixed percentage to give effectively a daily rate for each of the resources that goes into the frontline service and that's it's been done in the system but by doing us a cost allocation type posting but actually if you just think of it from the accounting point of view it's simply an apportionment based on splitting that overheads pot across all of the frontline services other ways that organizations do it becomes much more nuanced if they're more complex which is actually taking a proportion of the overhead costs and booking it directly to to the project so it might be that you've you've actually assigned some of the back office administrative staff to a project and that's what you end up doing if you've got a much larger organization like the international one i was talking about to start with i think it's quite difficult from the funding point of view because if you're donating money you don't want it spent on anything other than the front line but you would also expect the front line services to be as absolutely efficient as possible so you do have the responsibility to not just load on overhead costs in order to be able to um to to pass them on but you've also got to make sure they are as low as possible and so be very transparent about how you how you're driving efficiencies and making sure that you're actually keeping those costs down to a minimum in order to be able to support the the work that's being carried out by the charity is there anything else you'd add to that mark i think that's uh that's pretty good summary joe so if we don't have any other questions thank you very much for joining us thank you thank you very much thank you everyone you