Industries
NGOs & Non-Profits
A non-profit is accountable to more parties than a commercial business and has fewer people to satisfy them. Every donor wants the same money reported in a different shape, on a different calendar, in a different currency — and most organisations meet that demand by hand.
The situation
What we usually find
For NGOs, foundations and non-profits running multiple grants with separate donor reporting obligations.
The structural difficulty is that funds are restricted and reporting is not aligned. One expense may be split across three grants with three different reporting periods, three budget structures and two currencies. Where the accounting system holds only one dimension of analysis, the other two live in a workbook — and the workbook becomes the real system of record while the ledger becomes a formality.
The regulatory footing has changed underneath this. The Public Benefit Organizations Act 2013 finally commenced on 14 May 2024, replacing the NGO Co-ordination Act and moving oversight from the NGO Board to the PBO Authority, with annual reporting to the Authority. It has since gazetted thousands of organisations for deregistration over non-compliance, which has made administrative discipline an existential matter rather than a housekeeping one.
Meanwhile the sector’s own funding environment has tightened, and donors increasingly weigh the credibility of an organisation’s financial reporting when deciding renewals. The reporting is no longer just an obligation attached to the grant. It is part of what wins the next one.
How the work flows
Where the pressure points are
Every business in this sector runs a version of this cycle. These are the points where it strains when the systems behind it do not join up — and where the value of joining them up shows first.
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Award
Budget structures set up per donor, with no common chart underneath them
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Spend
Costs allocated across grants after the fact, by whoever remembers the split
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Track
Burn rate against each grant known monthly at best, and rarely by project staff
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Report
Every donor report rebuilt by hand in the donor’s own format and calendar
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Audit
Grant audits evidenced from workbooks rather than from a traceable ledger
What you would run
The products behind it
Not every product, and never one we cannot justify for your operation. These are the ones that fit this sector, and the reason each one is here.
Sage 200
Multi-dimensional analysis is the whole answer here: one transaction carrying donor, project, activity and cost-centre coding at once, so a donor report is a view of the ledger rather than a reconstruction of it. Multi-currency handles grants held and reported in different currencies.
TeamKazi
Programme and project tracking with cost-to-date against budget, so a project manager can see burn rate against their own grant without waiting for the finance team to produce it.
Sage Business Cloud
For smaller organisations with a handful of grants, where the priority is a clean audit trail rather than complex fund accounting.
What we would bring
The work around the software
The products are only half of it. These are the practices an engagement in this sector actually draws on, and what each one does here.
Data, Analytics & Business Intelligence
Getting donor reports to come out of the system in the donor’s shape, which is the single largest recoverable time cost in most finance teams.
ERP & Business Systems
Designing the chart of accounts and analysis dimensions so restricted funds are tracked by construction rather than by memory.
Process & Operational Excellence
Procurement, approval and allocation are where grant audit findings come from. These are process controls before they are system settings.
Managed Technology Services
Sector finance teams are small and stretched. Support that does not assume a full internal IT function, because there usually is not one.
Where we'd start
The first move
We would take your most demanding donor report and establish how much of it could be produced from the ledger as it stands today. The answer is normally a small proportion, and the gap between that and one hundred per cent is a precise description of the work.
Where we are not the answer
We do not publish a grants management or programme monitoring and evaluation platform, and where you already run one we integrate with it rather than replace it. We also do not write donor reports for you — we build the systems that produce them. If what you need is a finance officer rather than a finance system, that is worth establishing before either of us spends money.
Is this how your operation runs?
Tell us where it strains, and we will tell you plainly which of this is relevant to you and which of it is not — before you commit to anything.
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