How Solver Helps Nonprofits Prepare for Their Next Audit

In nonprofit organizations, audits are a fact of life. Charities are often required to undergo periodic independent audits to meet the conditions of grants or loans they've received, fulfill their own bylaws, or comply with relevant local, state, or federal laws. Audits can also be triggered by compliance issues, such as failure to file Form 990.

Even when they're routine, rather than punitive, audits are stressful … to put it mildly. Letting a stranger pore over your books can feel incredibly intimate and nerve-wracking. What if your organization made a mistake? What if details slipped through the cracks? Did out-of-date numbers accidentally land in a final report? Will everything look above-board to an outsider?

This process is also labor-intensive, not only for the auditor, but also the organization under the microscope. Gathering necessary documents, updating or creating reports, and making sure all of your data is thorough, up-to-date, and comprehensible for a third party is no light lift.

If your organization operates in the nonprofit sector, audits aren't going away. But with the right support, you can make them less taxing and stressful for your team. Here's how extended financial planning and analysis (xFP&A) solutions such as Solver help nonprofits prepare for audits without scrambling.

Create a Single Source of Truth for your Nonprofit

Nonprofits, like any business, generate lots of financial and operational data. Keeping track of all that disparate information and preparing it for public consumption, such as during an audit, can be overwhelming.

Let Solver's Data Warehouse do it for you. The Data Warehouse consolidates unlimited sources of information, including your nonprofit's accounting ERP, CRM, and fundraising system, to create a single source of truth that reflects your latest real-time data. Solver also automates grueling data consolidation processes with currency conversions, entry adjustments, and rollups. The result is a comprehensive, unified picture of your organization's activity and financial health that you can easily share with auditors and use to make better strategic decisions internally.

An auditor will want to analyze every aspect of your organization's financial history. When you have a single source of truth at your disposal, all the information they'll need is ready and waiting for them. No mad rush to find and reconcile what you need; it's already there.

Generating Robust and Readable Reports

Nonprofits have many regulatory requirements to juggle, from filing Form 990 and creating internal reports to submitting to independent audits. When an audit is around the corner, you don't want to burn hours creating, updating, and double-checking reports, and you don't want to cut corners and risk introducing mistakes.

Solver is designed to make reporting a breeze, while simultaneously boosting accuracy. It all goes back to that single source of truth. When all of your data is in one place and working together to tell a comprehensive story, the information feeds seamlessly into parameter-driven reports that update automatically and deliver real-time insights. Solver's platform is also designed to be used by anyone in an organization, combining familiar Excel interfaces with drag-and-drop simplicity. User dashboards clearly sort reports by source and subject, allowing anyone to quickly find the ones they need.

With tools like these on your side, a looming audit will be no problem. Organizations can create standardized, reusable audit schedules and reporting packages tailored to different audiences, whether for the board, donors, or your internal team. Once you've built these templates, you can re-run them with just a few clicks, exporting consistent, well-formatted auditor packages with confidence that all of the data therein is accurate, up-to-date, and harmonized.

Retracing Your Steps with an Audit Trail

Every detail matters in an audit. If questions come about, you don't want to have to scramble for answers or piece together what happened.

Thanks to Solver's audit trail features, you'll have all the information you need at your fingertips, ensuring both transparency and precision. Use audit controls to track when and why changes were made to reports, monitor approval histories, and more, ensuring accuracy and accountability.

With capabilities like automatic alerts about data discrepancies, Solver helps you identify potential issues before the auditors do, ensuring that mistakes never make it to your reports in the first place. 

Smoother Audits Translate to Organizational Success

Getting through an audit unscathed may be your surface-level goal, but the same tools that allow you to get through an audit without scrambling also put your nonprofit on the path to bigger and better things.

Effective nonprofit financial reporting is more than a compliance requirement; it is a foundation for transparency, accountability, and strategic decision-making. By simplifying consolidation, automating reporting tasks, and maintaining a robust audit trail, nonprofits can reduce risk, improve efficiency, and redirect resources toward their mission.

The same functionalities that make Solver an auditee's secret weapon (a single source of truth, automatically updated and synchronized data, simplified reporting, change tracking, and more) can also do amazing things for your nonprofit's day-to-day operations. With a 360-degree view of all the information that matters, both financial and operational, you can see what's working and what's not, plan for the future, and make decisions based on data, not gut feelings.

A smooth audit is only the beginning. Achieving your nonprofit's founding goal is the real reward. Ready to make stressful audits a thing of the past? Explore how xFP&A can support your organization.