Answering to charity watchdog agencies that demand low administrative ratios and nonprofit management advocates that recommend full cost transparency, nonprofit associations often find themselves in the position of having to dispel the “overhead myth.” Put simply, the myth states that low overhead equals a well-run nonprofit, when research shows that, in fact, the opposite is true(opens in new tab).
Yet, the modern-day nonprofit’s challenges don’t end there. Impact investing and donor-advised funds are both creating a culture whereby nonprofits must be able to demonstrate their effectiveness. Doing so is extremely difficult in an environment where data is siloed across fundraising, program delivery, marketing and finance. This makes providing accurate numbers and true operational costs a guessing game, at best.
As funders and grantors continue to demand more cross-functional data, and as FASB rules continue to evolve, NetSuite’s 2020 Release 2 includes a host of capabilities that help nonprofits effectively address these challenges.
Financial and Operational Excellence
- NetSuite 2020.2 enables nonprofits to now create statements of financial position (balance sheet reporting) on a custom segment – most commonly fund, grant, or program. Through a new, automated process, nonprofits can auto-balance accounting entries by multiple dimensions (i.e., segments), and create balancing segments by simply checking the balancing checkbox on the custom segment record.
- The NetSuite SuiteSuccess Social Impact Editions allow nonprofit organizations to allocate labor expense costs (salary + fringe benefits) to programs, projects or grant segments. This streamlines the process of billing actual costs to the grantor on cost-reimbursable grants and helps nonprofits easily view and report on total direct costs of running a program or project (including the actual labor costs).
- Bank reconciliations are streamlined with the added ability to automatically create and post transactions directly from imported bank data, thus greatly reducing the manual time to process and match your bank data to your books in NetSuite.
- You can easily consolidate multiple invoices into a single group invoice that can be delivered to the customer, with payments applied to individual invoices. This helps reduce the time it takes to manually group invoices—a tedious and error-prone process. It also ensures that invoices are delivered to the customer accurately to decrease days sales outstanding and improve cash flow.
- You can manage approvals and actions from the Employee Center by configuring an approval workflow for vendor prepayments. And users can leverage the CSV import assistant for bulk updates and imports of vendor prepayment transactions. You can also make copies of existing vendor prepayment transactions.
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The capabilities of Next Generation Custom Transactions have been extended with an increased number of transactions which custom transactions can be transformed to and from. Links will now be able to be created between those transformations, so that it is easy to reconcile the business flow of those transactions.
- Automated intercompany financial statements means fewer resources are needed for verification, allowing accounting periods to be closed faster and with less chance of human error.
- Easily net intercompany receivables and payables with a new feature that enables accountants and controllers to offset mutual intercompany open balances and auto-generate intercompany netting settlements. The result is fewer open intercompany transactions and reduced manual effort to manage open balances.
Optimizing the Project Lifecycle
- You can now calculate revenue budgets based on quantity and rates pulled in from rate cards, items and billing classes to achieve more accurate budgeting. The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) now allows users to save a template to more easily create future WBS budgets for similar projects. This is a real time-saver for companies that manage similar projects for numerous clients.
Continuous Employee Engagement
- The new SuitePeople Performance Management module provides HR leaders a central place to easily administer the performance review process that not only enables greater performance management efficiencies, but also helps employees stay engaged with goal creation, monitoring, measuring and recognition for achievements. Employees and managers continuously stay aligned on top priorities to maximize performance. (Available in North America only)
- Common tasks such as adding or updating direct deposit accounts in SuitePeople Payroll can slow down an HR department. Through employee self-service, employees can now add, remove or reorder up to 10 bank accounts for direct deposit using dollar amounts. With this added flexibility, HR staff save some time while employees have more options to allocate paychecks. (Available in North America only)
Learn More About NetSuite 2020 Release 2
These are just the highlights; there's much more for nonprofits in NetSuite 2020 Release 2 than can be covered in a single blog post. For more specifics on the complete list of new features, be sure to read the Release Notes(opens in new tab).
New to the release process? Learn more about it here.(opens in new tab)
Finally, be sure to request access to your Release Preview(opens in new tab) account. There, you can test to see how the new features will work with your own data and get a jumpstart on maximizing the impact of NetSuite 2020 Release 2.
The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products may change and remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.