Financial Management and Financial Vibrancy

Financial Monitoring and Management

Financial monitoring and management is not simply about keeping track of receivables and expenses.  It is the practice of estimating the actual cost of delivering programs and services on per unit basis of service or some other metric that helps illuminate the costs that impact on a particular revenue stream.  This contrasts with the practice of pooling all revenues from all revenue sources and pooling all expenses. 

The cost-accounting process allows for you to be aware of the true costs of programs and to work towards minimal amounts of subsidization.  This allows you to make decisions based on a sound financial knowledge of the program.

Success Stories | Lessons Learned

Business Planning

In developing a business plan, you are articulating not only how your agency’s program(s) will unfold from a service delivery perspective, but also how it will unfold financially, given its costs and forecasted revenues.

Success Stories | Lessons Learned

Food For Thought

Financially vibrant organizations do not limit their thinking to good stewardship and financial management. They go further and reflect on how their resourcing model and program model fit together and connect to their values about the work they do and the people they ask to help to do it.  It is a more systemic approach to creating an integrated vision of how money works to create value in communities. From this perspective, a financial statement is just a check-in with the financial roadmap and a proposal is a means to a collaborative relationship with someone else’s money, rather than a stopgap to keep the program going for a little while longer.

Notes from the Field

“We started with one location and one program and now have many locations.  We’ve seen lots of changes in how we do bookkeeping. At first, I just did the books, then set up the books and turned them into computerized books.  When we grew it was entirely different, and we now have four people just doing the books. I don’t know if what I did was innovative or if it’s standard, we just did what makes sense.”

Job Skills, Keswick

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