By: Peter van der Meij, Senior Solution Specialist and Principal Trainer at FinDock
Donor-focused fundraisers demand flexibility; they need space to maneuver when it comes to engaging donors. But too much flexibility can be at odds with the control needed by finance and accounting teams — especially when that flexibility involves new and alternative payment methods or processors.
If that sounds familiar to you, you’ll be delighted to learn that Salesforce.org’s Accounting Subledger (ASL) can now be connected with FinDock. Which means that nonprofits no longer have to choose between flexibility or control. Here are some tips for increasing your fundraising agility.
Donation Management From Lead to Ledger
FinDock is a Salesforce Native app that makes it possible to control the entire payment journey from within Salesforce. By extending the Salesforce platform with online and offline payment management capabilities, FinDock customers are able to take full advantage of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform.
Accounting Subledger is a Salesforce.org product that prepares your fundraising information for your accounting system. It saves fundraising and finance departments significant budget and time on reconciliation tasks by connecting systems to ensure a single source of truth for revenue and payment data.
Combining these two powerful products makes for a fundraising solution fully capable of managing the donor journey from lead to ledger, all on the Salesforce platform. FinDock has always been committed to providing a seamless integration with the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), and reporting on both revenue (from the NPSP perspective) as well as cash flow or even expenses (from the FinDock perspective) is now much simpler.
Using ASL in combination with FinDock provides nonprofit organizations with faster insights, which both fundraising and accounting teams can benefit from. Now it’s easier to track campaign performance, projected versus realized income, and various insights with regards to payment methods and channels.
Using ASL in combination with FinDock provides nonprofit organizations with faster insights, which both fundraising and accounting teams can benefit from.
Improved Operational Efficiencies
Because FinDock stores every payment the same way, and ASL is able to report that information in a consistent manner to the accounting system, organizations spend much less time on the reconciliation process. And if you have major donors, or institutional donors with specific restrictions, this combination allows you to allocate across programs, projects, and fiscal periods. Ultimately, it allows fundraisers to focus on what they do best — raise funds and connect with donors.
It even works for Payment Service Provider (PSP) transactions, which can be difficult to reconcile due to the net rather than gross payments by the PSP. Combining the individual transaction registration by FinDock with the export to accounting by ASL allows finance departments to easily reconcile these transactions with the actual payout from the PSP.
Make use of the powerful Salesforce reporting and dashboard tools to gain insights in payment method utilization.
Making Data-Driven Decisions
Accounting systems and CRM systems both house valuable data, and combining these two with Accounting Subledger allows for new insights into what combinations of payment methods, channels, and processors are the most cost effective for certain types of campaigns, donor segments, or events. This allows fundraising managers to make data-driven decisions on where to spend the resources at their disposal and calculate accurate ROIs for their campaign activities.
For such an overview to be possible and effective, however, every payment needs to be stored in a consistent manner and requires context. Payments should be linked to the right campaign, contact, and relevant (custom) objects. This is where FinDock comes in: through the unified payments data model, every payment is always stored in the same objects with differences in payment methods, channels, and processors expressed through picklist values.
This ensures consistency in payment method naming conventions and makes reporting easier. Furthermore, through the use of Guided Matching and its ability to enrich transactions with data from any standard or custom object or field, it makes sure every payment is put in context.
Further Personalizing the Donor Experience
So how does this impact donor engagement? Well for starters, if you save time on back-end processes, that leaves more time to communicate and interact with potential donors. But that is far from the only benefit — having the flexibility to quickly deploy new payment methods and processors allows you to really tailor the donation experience to each donor based on their preferences, location, and level of engagement.
With increasing demand for hyper-personalisation in every engagement, knowing all there is to know about your donor or constituent is just the starting point.
To truly offer the experience donors expect, you need to be able to act on that information. With FinDock and Accounting Subledger, nonprofit organizations of all sizes can build the foundation for an agile and hyper-personal fundraising and engagement strategy.
Learn more about fundraising and finance transparency for nonprofits with Accounting Subledger.
About the Author
Peter van der Meij
Senior Solution Specialist and Principal Trainer at FinDock
The post Increase Fundraising Agility with FinDock and Accounting Subledger appeared first on Salesforce.org.
