The Key Benefits of a Process Review

If there’s one thing a nonprofit is always thinking about, it’s the future.

Where you want your organization to be, how to fulfill your mission, your goals, growth, and development, the list goes on and on. However, if your current internal processes aren’t reflecting positive progress, you might be thinking…

What can I do? What are my next steps?

A process review can provide direction to help your organization plan and grow. Identifying areas within your walls that could benefit from tweaks and improvements, implementing the changes, leveraging top-tier technology, and maintaining solid financial controls will allow for endless dreams for the future.

If you choose to undergo a process review, your organization can expect to experience several immediate benefits.

Improvement in Performance and Accountability –

Improving your organization’s processes will allow you and your staff to focus more of your time, energy, and resources on the things that matter most; fundraising, improving stakeholder relationships, and fulfilling your mission.

Process reviews identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current processes and identify areas for improvement, and flag any risks. Our team helps you detect, understand, and prioritize any areas of concern, so you can make educated decisions around what work needs to be done to streamline and gain efficiencies. We’ll also document any new processes, so future transitions and onboarding of new staff will be significantly easier in the future.

What is unique about Maner’s process review is we provide customized risk matrices that provide visual displays designed to help management identify where to start the process. We also have an invaluable tool in the quest for best practices – internal technology experts.

Streamline Processes with Software Utilization–

When it comes to streamlining your internal processes, technology is perhaps the greatest tool we have. In each process review, we leverage our Maner technology team to ensure you have all the technological advancements and tools in place to manage tasks. We’ll offer realistic, custom solutions to help your organization understand what’s missing and how the right technology could help move it forward.

Suggestions may include leveraging technology to allow for electronic invoice approval, through your accounting software or with a third party or streamlining bank reconciliations. If board reporting is an area of concern, we may suggest and help design a reporting dashboard that allows for quick, easily understood monthly reports. If you have multiple software’s (and who doesn’t), we can offer our customized ManerLink to get your software talking, potentially eliminating the need to reconcile between systems.

Every process review report is individualized with your unique processes and goals in mind. All reviews aim to streamline your processes to increase internal controls, help prevent fraud, and save the organization time and resources. Because our Maner team has seen hundreds of different finance and accounting software, we know what systems work best and what bells and whistles you actually need.

Saving Time and Money –

Time and money are essential to ensuring your nonprofit achieve its mission. The simple fact that your organization’s current processes might be wasting valuable resources and costing additional dollars that could be spent in other areas for greater benefit is reason enough to justify the cost of a process review.

By eliminating clunky processing or paper-based systems, you free up your staff for higher-level activity, allowing them more time to analyze data, look to the future, and plan strategically. This creates an environment where the staff knows that their efforts are going directly toward supporting the mission and encourages innovation and creativity. Implementing 21st-century processes also means that you’ll be able to attract the best and brightest to your organization. Staff, board members, and stakeholders want to know that their time and effort, and in many cases donations, are going to an organization that uses its resources to the fullest, and a process review is a perfect step in that direction.

Maner Costerisan is here to help you understand the benefits that will directly help and improve your organization with a process review.

For more questions regarding process reviews and how they could help your nonprofit, contact Bethany Verble, CPA, CFE, Manager, and process review expert at bverble@manercpa.com or call us directly at 517-323-7500.