Nonprofit Financial Reports, Programs vs. Overhead

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“Do we need to focus on profit or programs?” It's the question nonprofits ask on a regular basis but when answers are buried inside data — it’s hard to build consensus. The goal with this base is to quickly identify your programs profitability, spread this knowledge around the organization and make decisions together from a place of shared understanding.

This base will take your bank transactions and quickly roll them up generating reports to show you Profit/Loss per program and program types like Overhead or Events. Create the classifications that are specific to your organization. You can also save time by categorizing your programs in Xero as 'Tracking categories'.

Tools I use

  • Xero for accounting (will update later for QuickBooks as well)
  • Airtable (I have a pro account for reporting apps but you don’t need pro)

In Xero

You only need to do this process at the beginning of a new month for the previous month’s data.

  1. Reconcile all transactions in Xero before you generate the report
  2. Run a ‘Detailed Account Transaction Report’ and export it to Excel
  3. Change the columns with financials to US dollar. (Maybe it’s just me but my financial data is always in pounds?)

In Airtable

  1. Copy all of your data from the Xero report and input it in the ‘Enter new data’ view starting in column B
  2. Find and remove any duplicates by referencing the date created column (I keep new entries and delete old ones)
  3. Check for any categorization errors in the ‘Add and Categorize’ view.
  4. Fix errors in the 'Add and Categorize' view by adding programs and verifying the "Program Type" formula.
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Updated November 10, 2020 at 3:58 PM
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Lauren Gardner

Lauren is a Director of the nonprofit collective Babycastles and is a partner at the School For Poetic Computation.
Explore the base
Enter new data
Add and Categorize
Programs (no overhead)
Overhead only