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Travel invoice template for non-profit organizations

nonprofit accounting tips are you already bored I know that most people most nonprofit leaders uh feel that accounting Finance Management Finance processes Finance systems are all very boring topics very confusing and also sometimes scary a little bit when we imagine that an auditor comes or a donor comes and looks add something in our financial systems and maybe doesn't approve and then what right that could be a big problem for your nonprofit and so that could make finance and thinking about Finance also a little bit scary so in that sense Finance and Accounting have a very bad name with most nonprofit leaders that I know with this video with my nonprofit accounting tips I hope to help you look at nonprofit accounting differently really very literally differently and I hope that this will help you to find energy to um show a little bit of love and care to your nonprofits accounting systems and finance processes because if you do if you invest a little bit of attention and love into it they will pay you back I promise and and when they pay you back it means that they will give you the data the information the numbers that you need when you need them in the way that you need them right doesn't that sound great yeah so how do we get there my biggest tip for you is approach this starting with the end in mind right so think about be in your role as maybe project manager or CEO of your nonprofit or Treasurer or finance manager think about what you actually need to have um from your Finance systems your accounting systems and your Finance team so what are things that you need uh to do with with information that they have in those systems processes and in the brains of your Finance team so what are the things um that you would like to use that information for so for example that could be uh maybe uh you think it's super important I think it's super important to create reliable um reports for your donors uh that have all the information in it that are correct and that are also on time yeah with and not delayed because things weren't uh you weren't able to find everything and so on and so forth maybe what you want to achieve is um to have a good cash flow projection so that you don't need to lie awake at night thinking about can we pay the bills next month can I pay the salaries two months from now that might also be something that you really wish you would have maybe you would like to be confident that the next project budget that you're going to MIT to a donor or going to send with a sponsor request is correct has all the items in it at the right price levels and so that you can be confident that if you get the money that you ask you have indeed all the money that you need right and who uh doesn't have this experience that sometimes you send out a budget and then you get the money and it turns out that actually you made a mistake in your budget or some of the price levels aren't uh realistic anymore and then you are in big trouble because you asked for something you got it and now you need to say yeah sorry but I made a mistake and I can't actually with this budget uh do all the things that I promis to do right that's not really what you want maybe the other thing that you would like to achieve is to be able to give to your supervisory board all the information that they need to understand how your nonprofit is doing how you're performing financially uh but also maybe in terms of time spent on certain things and so on and so forth right and there might be other things that you would like to uh to know or understand or be able to share quickly correctly uh that are based on your uh Finance data that is hidden somewhere in your systems or in the brains and computers of your Finance team so I'm curious to hear from you what are things that you would like to have um that are uh connected to finance and administration I'm Susanna bucker I'm a nonprofit operation strategist and I love Finance as I hope you can see and I talk about finance and other things at the back end of your nonprofit like HR admin fundraising management project design and more in this Channel and if you like to read stories about those topics then you can uh join my Weekly Newsletter you can find the link in the description below this video to uh receive two or three times emails from me per week with stories about nonprofit operations and uh strategic thinking about those operations so let's go back right so you've been thinking about what are the things that you would really like to have have be able to do be able to share be able to feel calm about uh that are connected with numbers with Finance with admin with accounting right so now it's the time to think about okay if I want to uh feel confident about my next project budget what is it that I need to get very concretely out of my accounting system or um that I that would need to be guaranteed by my finance processes or that my finance team should be able to give to me in just a few minutes after me asking yeah so let's imagine that you are preparing a project budget and you need to purchase something that you aren't really uh purchasing every day maybe building materials maybe you need a very specialized trainer or expert for something and you think it's is possible that in one of our past projects we actually bought building materials or we worked with an expert I can't remember the name I don't remember exactly when that was and and Etc but let's see in the system if we can find if we did something like this before and if we then can find all the information about it and so if your systems if your accounting system and your filing system and your Finance management system is set up properly and working properly then you would be able to find an invoice by maybe a Building Material Company or maybe uh an expert um and you could then see like hey this is what we actually paid for this number of items at that price and the delivery took uh this uh maybe two or three weeks or maybe two months and so on and so forth or we paid that expert for two days of work for the training but then they needed also time to travel and they needed time to report and we wanted to do some followup calls as well so this is the total that we paid that person and so you would be able to find all of that in your system and there's more because if your system is really working well then you would also be able to see on the invoice like who proov that invoice at the time and to which project were those expenses allocated so then you know which of your colleagues which of your team members you could go to and ask for more information maybe about the vendor is that the reliable person that they have to negotiate a lot about the price um was the quality of what was delivered good enough was the training uh evaluated positively by the particip participants were their tips uh Lessons Learned were the building materials good quality and so on and so forth so that could also be something that you could uh find out if you have that information in your system and then there's more because maybe it was a big order and maybe it was so big that ing to your policy you needed to do a procurement process and so maybe your uh colleague who at the time was in charge of that uh set up a procurement process and collected maybe three different offers from different suppliers and they evaluated this and all this dossier of the procurement could still in the ideal case be preserved somewhere on your shared drive and you would be able then to see like hey there are two other experts that I could also talk to to see if they uh if they're maybe available if there might be a better fit um there are other companies who could provide the same um materials so it would give you better insight into the market and the possibilities and the reasons why those suppliers were selected at a time and from your colleague you can then understand if they are still happy with that selection with that choice after all right so that is ideal of course because now if you include a number for this expert or those materials in your budget then you can be confident that this number makes sense right that it's realistic probably you'll uh add some inflation correction uh to it but basically you know what you're talking about and you can be confident that you have everything in place in your budget that if you get the money as per the budget you won't end up in uh trouble about it right so that would be a great result from just having in place a procurement policy a policy to make sure that somebody authorizes visibly the invoice so you know who was that uh a process whereby somebody indicates which project was involved so that you can easily find back all the project documentation with the evaluations for example of the training that was provided um and of course the system that will help you identify that you actually used such a service before right so that's I think a very neat example of how the Nitty Gritty can help you actually uh work on a good budget that doesn't uh cost you a loss of sleep at night but let's now look at another example and let's imagine that you think okay I got that budget I submitted it we got approval now we need to report but I'm really not looking forward to that because the budget I got a little bit over uh enthusiastic and I created a very complex budget with a lot of budget lines and activities and sub activities and whatnot and I really don't know how I can keep track of everything how I can monitor this let alone how I can report this and then how can I make sure that I can report on time because of course if my report comes late that is uh yeah a bad point uh in our book um with this donor for our reliability and professionalism of course right so so you might think like oh why did I create such a detailed complicated budget I should never have done that but here we are right don't worry because it doesn't matter how complicated your budget is if you have your systems in place you can very easily create uh a reporting format that links to the export of your accounting system there are ways also for some systems that you can link directly from your system to excel but um if you're using Excel as your accounting system or if you're using tools like QuickBooks or exact online or Sage or wave or whatever you can export data from your system uh and you can uh make it so that you link that data to your uh budget lines and create a very simple um overview of expenses against the budget line that you can use for monitoring and that you can also if you make it look a little bit nice uh and if it meets the donor's requirements for reporting then you can use this also for reporting right and that will take a little bit of time investment at the start for each of your project budgets to set up a template or a format whatever you want to call it for this reporting that you will use as monitoring maybe on a monthly basis and Reporting ing to the donor's frequency um that will take a bit of time at the start right because you need to create the the nice looking overview of your budget you need to find the best way to link your export to the budget lines with a formula you need to um make sure that you put in some checks that you're sure that you're not overlooking anything but once you've set that up and you're looking at it and you think like nah this doesn't look right I think there's a mistake maybe something wasn't classified correctly in the accounting system I need to go back to my accounting system and change that um and then the magic is that once you've set up this format you can make changes in your accounting system ing to your internal rules for that of course and make a new export and put that into your reporting format and within seconds you have a revised overview and you can see that now everything looks uh good to you that it's as you expect it and that the mistakes have been corrected right so that sounds maybe too good to be true but this is really how it can work for you and this is something that I do all the time not every day but for sure every week I create at least one of those things a reporting format or template or I update a report and it really is not rocket science it's very easy once you've set it up and then it can work for you anytime and you can have access to your information and get insights into how your project is doing any time so that's great right but maybe you feel like um those examples what does it actually mean right what are then the things that I should create so that those examples can work for me too so let me give you a list this is just a few items there's probably more but key things for you to think about are for example a finance policy to set up a policy that uh speaks about things like procurement that speaks about how to allocate expenses to a project visibly correctly in line with the budget and so on and so forth how to authorize invoices so that you can know who to talk to about a certain invoice a certain cost uh that could be one thing for you to create another thing that you could want to create and I'm just going to check the list that I made that I'm not forgetting anything it's a good system for filing your invoices right so that you can find easily the things that you need to find with your procurement dossier for example but also an individual invoice um and so on and so forth right that you have logical system that everybody who needs to access this kind of inform information can access and can uh easily find their way in and then for this kind of system you would also need to think about how am I going to monitor or who's going to monitor that uh we're sticking to the rules for for example naming conventions or organizing certain folders right somebody needs to monitor that because otherwise things could still get messy people might keep documents on their own laptop top and not um upload them to the share drive because it takes time and they think I'll do it tomorrow and tomorrow is not good enough of course because then your whole goal of having access to everything when you need it isn't going to work for you so the other thing that you could uh also want to set up in the beginning is uh a practical approach for your accounting system right whether that's Excel quick books Sage wave exact online whatever it is think about how you want to set it up so that you can extract information in the easiest way for you to match it to your project budget to have uh an easy way of linking the information for monitoring and Reporting purposes so that could mean that you need to think about what kind of ledgers what kind of accounts do I need in my accounting system uh what are maybe cost centers or cost units or projects or other kind of labels that I want to use in my accounting system to classify certain costs and to help me understand which cost belongs to which project and to which budget line within that project maybe to which activity within that project and so on and so forth right but another part of that practice would also be like how do you want things to look inside your accounting system right I've seen sometimes systems where it just said the name of the supplier and an amount and that's of course not going to help you with your um uh quest for finding information for example for your budget uh but not also it might be hard for you to use that in a report right you might not understand what it was that you have been p paying for and whether that was for this project or another project this activity or another activity so you would also like need to think about how are you going to uh present information in your accounting system so that you already know the key things about each item uh without needing to go to your filing system and look at the actual invoice right so that could mean that you have conventions the uh the structure of your booking lines like the name of the supplier the item that you're paying for the period the number of items or units uh the unit price for example maybe dates or whatever it is uh foreign currency that you've been using to pay uh so that you can understand if there could be a discrepancy there with due to currency exchange issues and so on and so forth right so that could also be something for you to uh set up and finally another thing that you could want to set up to make those two examples possible is a good approach that everybody is involved in for um receiving and uh approving invoices for example so that it's clear from the invoice uh what you're paying for for and whether it belongs to this project or that project and uh including the uh correct authorizations for example right so those are just four things that you could want to set up in order to uh get easy access to data information to numbers that you need to achieve your goals of being a reliable nonprofit partner to your funding partner because you deliver good quality reports in time and you're not going over budget because you've been able to monitor everything very carefully and of course a professional nonprofit who knows what to ask for and presents reliable uh realistic budgets also to the donor in time for example yeah so that's how I feel uh nonprofit accounting can uh get a better name or can feel less of a burden less of a boring and confusing thing if you look at it uh starting with the end in mind um and keep at all times your eyes on what it is that you're doing all those nitty-gritty things for right why are you signing off on invoices why are you making sure that everything is filed away nicely that is because then you'll have access to information later on that you will need to be a reliable realistic um predictable good partner to your funding Partners which will make it possible for you to grow your team your operations in service of growing your reach and your impact for the community and the course you serve right so I think that that's a big enough ambition to spend a little bit of your energy and love and attention to something as boring as nonprofit accounting and finance processes I hope you feel a little bit of my energy coming over to you and if you need more just let me know join my nonprofit support community and I'll try to give you a bit more enthusiasm for nonprofit finance and administration if you want to know a few of my key very simple tips of what I do in Excel when I'm creating those reporting formats for example join me in my next video when we're going to be talking about that bye for now