Name: Leading with Clarity: A CFO’s Guide to Proactive Cash Management
Uploaded: 2026-03-17T18:30:20.733Z
Duration: 52 min 20 s
Description: Leading with Clarity: A CFO’s Guide to Proactive Cash Management

Transcript for "Leading with Clarity: A CFO’s Guide to Proactive Cash Management": Hey, everyone, and welcome. My name is Caroline, and I'll be kicking things off today. Thank you for joining us for Leading with Clarity, a CFO's Guide to Proactive Cash Management. Let's see. Trying to go to the next slide here. Perfect. Before we dive in, let's quickly cover a few housekeeping details. On the right hand side of your screen, you'll see the control panel with chat, docs, polls, and q and a. These are your tools to interact with us throughout the session. In the docs tab, you can download today's webinar, and we'll send you an email of the webinar recording after the session as well. For polls, all poll questions will appear in the polls tab. Each poll will stay open for a few minutes so you have time to respond. If you're looking to earn CPE credit, responding to polls is required. Note, the polls tab will disappear once the polls close. 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And then just to go over again, CPE credit is available for the session. You must answer all three poll questions to receive CPE credit. Certificates will be sent out within two weeks of the webinar over email. And if you have any questions or issues, please reply to the email or contact here. Awesome. And with that, let's get started. I'm excited to hand things over to Andrew. All right, thanks. Well, thank you everybody for joining me once again. We're gonna talk about what's kind of king in the world, cash. So thinking about how non profit nonprofits deal with cash and how we can kind of think about it a little differently to maybe make our lives a little easier. And, I mean, that's the goal of this string of web webinars is really to think about how, as a CFO or a controller, even a staff accountant, to kind of reclaim your day from all those fire drills, emergencies, and everything else we have to deal with. Apologize. It looks like the webinar platform's having a little issue with the slides, so it's a little jumpy. So if I have to jump back and forth, I apologize. So who am I? I am Andrew Harrow. I'm the director of finance at Fifth Avenue Committee. I'm also the founder and partner of Finnovate for Good, which is really a consulting firm designed to help nonprofits get the most out of what they're paying for already. But if you're gonna have to make that investment in processes or technology, then you're making it wisely and being a good steward for your organization. Been in the nonprofit world fifteen years, and you can see there my daughter and my son. My son looks as scared as she should be when my daughter grabs him and grabs a hold. So what are we gonna talk about today? We're gonna focus a lot on kind of where the problem comes in when you think about cash management, what it probably looks like today for most of you and what really reclaiming that day might looks like might look like, think about that cash management framework. What can it look like? What should cash management mean to you and your organization? What an action plan would look like, and then next steps. Like I said, I apologize for the slides. They seem to have a mind of their own today. So I'm just gonna kinda talk and and kinda go as I need to. I apologize for any disruptions. So thinking about cash, in theory, should really be simple. Money in, money out, what's going on, where is it from, how is it used. But I think once you get into the nature of some of our businesses and how we do things, it gets a little more complicated. And thinking about predicting cash, we've all gone to our development teams or our program teams and gone, hey. When is this money coming in? And they look at you like you have four heads and have no idea. So it's sometimes it's hard to plan, and it's not as simple and trying to think about ways to be proactive and really get down. So let's think about, like, where the problem comes into when it comes to cash. And when I always think of cash, I think about what is now sixteen years ago when I moved to New York City. Cash was still king. There wasn't Apple Pay. There wasn't Google Pay. There wasn't Tab to Pay. Everywhere you needed cash. And I remember when I first got here, I made a decision not to carry around cash because I realized very early on, I worked in Midtown Manhattan, and it was the summer, and there was an ice cream truck on the corner of every street. And now when it comes to ice cream, I have the willpower less than my three and a half year old. So I decided that cash wasn't king for me, and I just couldn't carry it around because I knew what I would be spending it on. And thinking about that for your organization, there are organizations that I've talked to that are afraid of cash because when there's cash into the bank, the program team or the executive director just wants to spend it because it's a rarity. And, like, we have these resources. Let's spend them, but that's not good stewardship for your organization. So thinking about why it's important to plan. A lot of nonprofits I also talk to when it comes to accounts payable, they get billed in. They pay them. But what are your payment terms? Are you on a thirty day? Because I've had vendors call me a week after they send a bill asking for payment, and it's kinda like, we pay net 30. Like, you gotta give us some time. Now what are your policies for that? How do you manage your inflows and outflows? How do you manage those downtimes that we all have in nonprofit world? Whether it's in between galas and year end and calendar year end or just how do we manage what what what is inevitably going to be some sort of slow season? So thinking about that as we look at this, what are most of us doing right now? So I think most of us would love to be on the left side where we'd be scenario planning, working on really in-depth comprehensive board reporting, thinking about our strategies for grants. Are we going after the right grants? Do we have a threshold for reporting when it comes to grants? I've met nonprofits. When you get When you manage your cash effectively, we all have those one or two grants that just really has onerous reporting. Grants are funders, and we've all sat there and gone, is this money worth it? And for all those nonprofits, the answer is almost always yes because you're never gonna turn down money. But if you've learned to manage your cash properly and have it maybe put away in some investments to be able to build, you might be able to get to a point where you go, you know what? If you're not giving me, let's just throw out a number, $50,000, you get standard reporting. We can't do all this reporting for a $5,000 grant. I just sat there this morning doing a grant report for for a small grant and had to go back to our grants team and go, we might not be able to accept this next year because I spent way too I spent more than that doing the reporting. And no one ever wants to say no to money, but thinking about how you manage cash and time might not be worth it. And thinking about how to look at the bigger picture, which is that organization risk management. Now what I guess some of you are doing today how much cash we have in the bank? Oh, I have to go in the bank portal. And some of us have multiple banks that we have some for investments or we took out a lot. We have a line of credit. We have to have money over here, or we got a CD over here that had a better rate. So you know what? To get a full pack picture, I have to log in to three or four or five bank portals. Before I went into consulting, I was in microfinance. We had 21 different banking partners. To do so to get a full cash picture before I got there, they would have a person who would spend the first two hours of their day logging into all 21 bank portals, getting the balance, getting the activity, and creating, a cash sheet. And before he got there, it was the CFO doing it, which was really a waste of time and money. So thinking about how are we getting the information? Where is that single source of information? We're gonna talk about that. What kind of snapshots are you getting? Are you giving your board or your executive director or even your program teams a snapshot of what cash you have? What's coming down the pipe? When do you have payables? When do you have payroll? How are you looking at cash not just today, but in the future? How are you doing really that financial planning and analysis or FP and A function when it comes to cash? What are you looking at? We're gonna talk about some really easy to maintain, hard to implement strategies to really think about how to move that forward. Like I said, one of the big things is chasing those grant and that funder money. What is the timing? Can we predict it? And we all know sometimes it's at the whim of the person who's donated the money, and you can't really push them. But sometimes it's how can we predict that out? And how can we use our institutional knowledge of knowing when things kinda do come in to really run around? And how can we I'm gonna say this again later. How can we avoid being a zero interest bank for our funders and our government entities? And really, how can we get away from these fire drills when it comes to cash, when it comes to payments, when it comes to all these things together? And I think this ties in nicely to the last webinar we did on accounts payable, had a free up time. The next one we're doing is really on that grants management piece from a finance perspective. It all kinda comes together. And if we can solve these little problems throughout the day, say five, ten minutes a day, that adds up to hours upon hours to do all this risk management, grant strategy, thinking about processes and procedures that time today. So then really getting to the the gist of it, how does cash management steal your time today? And I talked to a lot of CFOs and controllers and even thinking about my own day job. Manual processes in cash reporting that either your cash isn't your bank feed isn't connected to your accounting system. Your you have multiple banks. You really don't check it every day. No real time visibility. There's no single source of truth that if somebody says, hey. How much cash do we have today? It's a I need to look it up and get back to you. There's no single point of, like, hey. Or even weekly. Like, right now, I I had when I had a staff here, I just made a point of every day. You know what? Make me a cash cover sheet. That's the two things. One, it told me without having to log in to six banks where what my cash balances were. But b, it got her in the habit of them recording everything every day and reconciling the bank every day because she was already in there looking at the bank, and we had implemented the process. I'm like, hey. If you do the bank rec for fifteen minutes a day, then it's not gonna take you eight hours on the thirtieth, the thirty first, or first. And we were able to save time, but it also, a, gave me an accurate cash sheet, but it also gave my financials were up to date. That the cash balance in my financials were truly what I needed to be. I'm sure we all waste time chasing those grant funds that I'm sure most of us have some form of cash forecast. I know mine. The majority of stuff is either twelve thirty one or six thirty because we're a six thirty organization or next year, thinking about cash. So thinking about how do we predict this, and how do I get better? Because I know I'm predicting everything either half year or end of year, but how can we accelerate that? How can we get a little more exact to know, okay. This is coming in January instead of sometime between January and June? And thinking about really looking at what we have. What do we bill versus what just gets paid versus what relies on reporting? And build out that schedule knowing our capacity to really think about how we're gonna do this, and really just getting away from those fire drills. We've all had those emails pop up. It's one of the reasons when I do these webinars, I close my Outlook because they're always gonna happen. It's what what's gonna take you away from focusing on what you plan to do today? We've all had those days where we had the best plan. We're gonna work on this. You open it first thing, and then for some reason you open Teams or Outlook or Gmail, and next thing you know, it's 7PM, and you have not touched that spreadsheet or Word document or journal entry that you started 10:12 hours ago. So thinking about what is those emergencies? What is the cadence that people expect from you? That I've said the president of my organization that if I'm in the office, I usually only check my email a few times a day. If you really need me, my door for the most part is open. Please just come talk to me because I'm trying to get some work done. Because I have a three and a half year old at home who does not like when dad sits at the the computer and works when I get home. So I'm gonna try to get as much done, but if there's a true emergency, come talk to me in person. I know for some people that is a crazy thought to go talk to somebody in person, but I think it helps when thinking about how to reclaim your day is to get away from some of those emails and just have a thirty second conversation most times can think solve things. But think about what is a true fire drill? What are those things that you're gonna stop what you're doing and look at? For most of us, it's an email from our boss, the executive director or CEO. It's the other emergency that I have because I'm in housing. If a general contractor hasn't been paid and is gonna walk off a job or insurance needs to be paid on one of my housing properties. Those are the only real emergencies I have. Everything else can usually wait. People might think it's an emergency, but to lay that groundwork allows me to kind of control my day a little more. Because there's always gonna be stuff outside of control, so try to control what you can. And I think a big theme of what we're talking about here is how do we be proactive and not reactive? And I think this reactive cash management of do we have enough in the account? Let's move money. Let's make sure we can pay the bills. Okay. Let's compare against the balance and think about what we have. As a team, depending on how inside your team, you can lose eight to twelve hours a week. And there's a risk there that, you know what? We're paying bills as they come in. Everything looks good. Uh-oh. A grant payment was delayed because of a a government shutdown. A grant payment was delayed. And you know what? Payroll's still gonna come. And I always tell organizations, if you do no other cash planning, just make sure you have about a month's worth of payroll as a reserve because that's the one thing you never wanna have to miss. And I think some of this fire drill reactive stuff leads to staff burnout. Not only staff burnout, but for a lot of CFOs and controllers, it can just be a lot. I see in the chat, I love that quote. A lack of poor planning on somebody else's part does not mean it's an emergency on my part. But we all know even if it's not your circus, not your monkeys, usually, as the top financial person in nonprofit, it becomes your circus. It becomes your monkeys. But I do actually have that on a a piece of art in my office in front of my computer that says that when people walk in. So I do let people know that, but you know we all know that even if you didn't cause it, sometimes you gotta deal with it. So but thinking about that cost of strategy that you're not allowed to think ahead. And I see the other problem I see with a lot of nonprofit is they budget their fiscal year. But once the fiscal year is done, you still have the next month. And so many nonprofits, they go go, let's get all the money in. Let's let's flatten it out. Let's make sure we have cash through June 30. But what happens July 1? And that's why one of the things we're gonna talk about is a rolling cash forecast that doesn't just end at the year end and thinking about that as well. So that brings us to our first poll question. So that's gonna get launched, and you'll see that on the poll tabs in the right. So real question is how much time do you think your team spends with manual cash reconciliations? And whether that's from having to get stuff from Razor's Edge because it's not connected or getting stuff from your development team or your program teams or your credit card companies and just spending time manually reconciling throughout the year. So just get your vote in. We're just trying to get a gauge of how people are kind of doing their cash. But while we're waiting, I'll move on. So we've kinda looked at what having a crazy day in cash management looks like and what's not work. So what would reclaiming that day look like? So picture this morning when you logged in, and you had a dashboard ready that told you what your cash balances was were what your expected outflows were, and that if anybody had any questions, there was somewhere they could go that wasn't you. And there was a process to get that updated every day, and everybody knew, that would be helpful and knew where to go. So I think thinking about how to have that dashboard, how to have those forecast. I wouldn't even say auto update. Just have it rolling. And we'll talk about some strategies to do that as we move on. But think about how to have those forecast go, how to not be at the end of every month and updating your your monthly forecast as a crazy thing to get it ready for the meeting. And think about how your system can be the first to answer. Going back to what I talked about my staff, when she did that daily cash report and was reconciling, as she went along, I didn't have to log in to the bank because I could just pull up the bank rec in my system at the time, and that was my cash balance because she was going through every day. And maybe there were one or two transactions that she hadn't recorded, but that was part of our cover sheet was what's not recorded from the prior day. Because that was what she had to do, really just stay on top of cash. That was her job. So thinking about how we can really streamline some of these things. Now if you reclaim today, what would that look like? Well, you're gonna be able to make a faster decision when it comes to do we have the bandwidth to pay for this? Or we've all gotten those grant reports or grant contracts or vendor contracts and as a payment schedule and thinking about, does this work for us? How does this fit into our workflow? How are we gonna go about doing it? I think it makes those decisions faster when you already have a bigger picture in front of you. It's gonna lead to less reconciliation time. Most nonprofits, I'd say, on a monthly basis, not a quarterly or annual basis, if you can reconcile your cash, your AR, and your credit cards, that you're most of the way to closing your books for the month. And then it's usually a lot of some some allocations, some other stuff, but those are usually the big three that I say. If you can get those done in the first day or so of the close, and we can talk all about why some organizations can't, mine included, I'd say you're in a good place. So thinking about how can we speed up these reconciliations. And if you can get all the cash transactions in by the first of them every month, you have a clear picture of what happened that month. And even just budget the actuals on a cash basis, the second day of the month is much better information for our program people as long as you explain what you're giving them. It's gonna lead to fewer interruptions during your day thinking about, can we pay this? Was this paid? Do we have the cash for this? This this got delayed. What does this mean? And just fewer interruptions, it's going to make it easier to kinda think more strategically, to lay out, okay. Here is a cash forecast. I'd like to actually think about how our inflows and outflows go. And what that usually leads to is calmer finance people, and we always know calmer. And I would say, if you're pitching any of this to your organization, just say it's gonna make us calmer, and calmer people usually say yes to things. If you are stressed out and trying to figure out all of this and not having any minutes of the day, any new thing anybody gives you, you're immediately gonna say, no. I've done it. We've all done it. But if you are calmer, you're able to think through things strategically, that thinking about how can how can this work for us, and how can we make the organization stronger? Because I think everything we're talking about when bringing up time of finance people is really in route to make the organization stronger and have a more stable foundation moving forward. So we've kinda looked at the bad, and now we're gonna we looked at the good. So how do we get there? What are some actual strategies that you, on this call, can take away and think about implementing at your organizations? And what do I kind of think of when I think of that cash management framework? It really comes down there's four things that when I was thinking about this really hit home. And you can see them on the screen, so But really, it's how can we have And this will also be a big thing for our next webinar when we're talking about that kind of grant management from a finance picture. How do you have one source of truth? If somebody asks you what cash is available, are you looking at your bank, your GL, your bank rep? Where are you looking? Because I've been with organizations where the CFO and controller use the accounting system, but the CEO uses the bank. And the problem there is they were cutting a lot of checks. So the bank balance could have been inflated to what was actually available to spend and sometimes by about a $100,000, which was a big number for them, that decisions were being made at a CEO level that didn't have the full information. So I think the first thing is figuring out where is our source of truth. How are gonna build that? Is it a cash management worksheet that goes out to the management team every morning or every week saying, here's what we have. Here's what we plan on paying. Here's what's outstanding. Here's what's coming in. Is that gonna be the truth? Is it going to be the bank? Because we've instituted something like Blackbaud's payment assistance through Repay that when we pay even checks, it gets pulled, so our bank number really is our book number? Or is it gonna be some or is it gonna be your account your accounting system? That we are going to say we're gonna reconcile even weekly, and so we're gonna be able to really hone in and make sure that these numbers are correct. So thinking about where is that source of truth gonna happen? Forecast. At a minimum, I would say a thirteen week projection, a rolling cash forecast that's every thirteen weeks. That is that tends to be about ninety days, which is a good gauge for are we gonna be good over the next ninety days? And that way, it's rolling that you know, hey. For the next three months, based off our projected inflows and outflows, we can cover payroll. We'll be fine. We have some reserves. We can predict what we're gonna pay. And then that's continuously updating every week and keeps rolling. So, therefore, it's not bound by the budget. It's not bound by a fiscal year. It's something that's real and gets updated in real time. And we'll we'll get into some strategies to set that up. Because like I said in the beginning, this is an easy one. Once it's set up and systematic to keep with, it's that that first few times you do it is going to be you're gonna be cursing my name probably. But it's one of those things. Once it's up and running, it's very easy to keep going. What can you automate out of this? Whether it's automatic bank feeds, whether it's using some form of AI agent or AI tools, whether it's you know what? We're gonna connect. We're gonna get we have so many banks we're gonna get a third party tool that's kinda becomes our single source of truth. And our accounting system can't handle it. We don't want somebody to log in. So we're really gonna take a step back and and think about this holistically, and where can we automate it. But I would also say, if you're gonna automate part of this process, it still needs review. There is still nothing in this world that is set and forget. That if you are using some form of AI, some form of automation, make sure you have some form of check-in. Make sure that you're some form of even if you have automatic bank fees, maybe at the end of every week, you're just checking that the bank balance coming in for your bank matches what the bank actually shows to make sure that those feeds are working. Don't assume things are working because then you could also still be working with the wrong data. And then I think another the other the fourth pillar here is how can you make this visible to people in your organization that need this data? And what do they need to see? Are you an organization that's really fund heavy? And that's why you're using FBNXT. And people wanna know how much they have to spend. Can you make a dashboard for them as to their cash balance to spend using rights and filters and all that and all the the proper fund accounting to give them the information they need? Because you're never gonna be able to answer every question, but if you can answer the first, like, 80% of their questions, which is usually just general information with some form of dashboard, some form of weekly information, I think that's key to allowing people to use the information wisely and ask more detailed questions that end up being a little more strategic than more data entry and report. Alright. So speaking of we're gonna go through these pillars and kind of what are we doing today, what a goal would be, and kind of what is the first step you could take. So when I think of centralization, it's having manual portals, having this be a manual snapshot. Even the cash forecast that's once a month isn't the most helpful. Having different people pulling the data from different places. And one of the things I always say, and people do find it annoying, is if you're gonna ask a question about cash in the bank or numbers that aren't closed, please make sure you come to me because there's a lot of moving pieces, and my staff always get bit annoyed. They're like, oh, I can supply that information. I'm like, yes. But you don't know we have this giant bill we have to pay. So if you say we have a 500,000 in the bank, that's not true because I know our AP run is a 120,000 this week, and then we have payroll next week. So, really, we don't have that much cash in the bank. And I don't want you telling people we do without the full picture. So when you think about centralizing is what does that full picture look like for your organization? And what information would be necessary? You think of, like, a funnel. What information would need to come into the funnel to give you that full picture? And I know some of you are sitting there going, well, I don't have the information that would go in the funnel, but I think it's key to map that out and think about how would you go about getting that information. How could you estimate that information? So having and so the goal is really having one place where live weekly balances live that if your board chair if your finance chair called you up and said, hey. I need a cash I need a cash picture as of today, you would feel comfortable just sending that off and knowing, you know what? It's it's as good a picture as we have with the information we have. And we know what we're estimated. We have that laid out. So thinking about how to really centralize this data, maybe not audit ready, but board ready. I think there's a different clarification there. But and what what is the first step you can take? It seems simple, but take a second and list out every bank account your organization has and what bank it's with. If you're all at one bank, even better. But just start simple, listing out all the accounts you have and then listing what happens in those account. Where do your where does your AP come from? Where does your checks come out of? Where do your grants come into? Where are your investments held? Because once you have that data mapped out, now the next step is taking it into a model. We're thinking about how to filter that into a dashboard. So really thinking about what we can do today, that first place, list every account in one place. Automate. How can we reduce the manual things we're doing? And I always say this to clients during webinars to don't say it's my wife or children, but almost everybody else in my life. If you've thought there's a better way to do something, in today's day and age, there probably is. And if somebody can tell me how to get a toddler to bed better, I will take any and all suggestions. But thinking about you have your bank reconciliation. Now most of us do it most nonprofit I see kinda do it throughout the month, but really that heavy work comes at the end of the month. If you're doing it daily and just researching one or two things you don't know about on a daily basis as opposed to looking at 10 things or 30 things things weekly or monthly, that can save you a lot of time. Not only weekly, but come the end of the month, all that time we're done shoving things into the system and making sure our bank accounts reconcile and printing out reports, all that time now becomes, hey. Let's actually look at the reports. Let's see what happens if what what we're actually what the reports are actually telling us. And is there a better way to lay it out? It's always interesting because then what happens is you give more reporting. And I'm sure we've all had the caveat is once you start giving a board more reporting, they want more and more and more. I was at a board meeting last week, and we presented numbers on a individual entity basis for the first time. It always just been on a consolidated basis. And the amount of things they then wanted to was insane. And I'm like, it's been twenty five years. You've never gotten this. Let's slow down. But thinking about you now have the time to reconcile banks. There are bank recs. And that time you're saving is really gonna go into that analysis and organizational strategy because you're actually gonna be able to review numbers and question things. Thinking about how money goes out of your organization. Thinking about how you can eliminate bottlenecks. Are you using how does your payments get approved? Who is in charge? It's funny because I was working with an organization, and for every check, they needed three signatures. Three. Three signatures. For every ACH, the CFO had two logins to the bank and did them all itself. So thinking about how to eliminate those payroll approvals and having that cash report, how can you automate it? Is it coming from are you just able to set up an Excel spreadsheet where you dump the bank feed in and it updates? And thinking about how you can always keep that current. I wouldn't even say zero prep, but with a little bit of prep so that you can actually review it. And I I see a question in the chat I'm actually gonna address now. So how can bank fees work if we receive a hard number of donor deposits into our clearing account? So two things there. There's two ways to do it. One is to just try to stay on top of it, and it's really it can be really hard because it it's chasing. It's working with development who doesn't always wanna work with you. It's trying to figure things out, but I also think part of that is, okay. Let's put it into a clearing account, and we're gonna reconcile the bank. Now that that's done, you know what we have time to do is actually book all those deposits and reconcile that better because we know we're not gonna have to spend all this time reconciling a bank account at the end of the day. So what I found is sometimes some of these cash management time savers, the place the time then goes is to really working with development to tie those things out better. So it's kind of like, let's save time over here to move here. Not always a one to one, and sometimes we have to we have to know that accounting is always this fight between accuracy and timeliness. And we have to think, okay. How timely do we wanna be if we know these things are gonna be off? And do we have to estimate here? Do we have to group here and then reconcile later? So it's really on an organization by organization basis, but that the donor deposit reconciliation, especially if it comes in from, like, a bulk credit card or something like that, can take time in thinking about how to systematize that too as big. And I think we'll talk about that a little bit in the webinar next month when we talk about grant management and donor management. It's I wanted to address that because it's a common question that comes up. That brings us to our forecast. Like I said, the best way to start, I always say, is you wanna have that thirteen week projection because that's ninety days. That's a quarter. That's what most people are gonna care about. And and if you're not able to do a year in-depth, a quarter is good. Update it weekly. I always say every Monday, let's update that cash forecast. Let's figure out what came in. Let's figure out what we're still waiting on. That way, you can also chase down receivables that you should be getting. We've all had those points where we've fulfilled everything, excuse me, with a government entity, and they still have intent to cash. So let's figure out why. Now as I'm on the slide, I'm gonna launch the second poll question just so we get it in. You can go ahead. I'm a little early on that, it might take a second to launch. How are you currently using your accounting system for cash visibility? Just give an answer there. I'm gonna jump back to the forecast while that that launches in the poll section. So updating that, it never gets stale. It becomes a working document. And you know what? I think one of the things you have to realize when going into the forecast is it's gonna be wrong. That's the idea. And don't get discouraged if you're changing it when you first start out every week that you're making major changes to how it goes. That's fine. That's part of this process. One of the examples I give is I worked with an organization where they could not predict AP, and they could not predict revenues. They kind of predicted on a monthly basis the revenue, but AP, nothing. So what we did is we took their budget, which is an annual budget, I divided by 24, twelve months every and what I did in my model is every two weeks, I just had one twenty fourth of the AP going out, at least to start. Because then what we did is we built up a database of when payments went out and what they were for and how they were going. And it really allowed us to see and grow, but at least that was something to start our model with. And what we did for revenue, to be honest, is at the end of every month, we just had one twelfth of revenue coming in. And as we went on two years later, we actually had a functioning ninety day model. But to start, we literally just took the bulk numbers, group them together, and threw them on a report. And then as we put actuals in and as we figured out what categories we wanted to track, it allowed us to make it a little more detailed. And then come budget time, we had this more detailed information. And like I said, this was not easy to set up or get them in the habit. But once we once we got about twenty six weeks in, it was something that the organization used, and they were able to they they went from having cash planning meetings with AP that says took three hours. These were now down to emails because they had a clear picture of what was going on. And it really allowed them to anticipate the gas before they hit. They knew which funders they could kinda push to get money in early, or would they have to draw on the line of credit? And you know what? If we know we have to do it next month and interest rates are lower now, let's draw on it and need a little bit of interest. And it really just allowed them to be on top of it. But what I would say is if if this is all new to you, you've never done this before, start with the look at what you've spent in the last four weeks, what's come in and come out, and look at your next four weeks and predict that. And once you've done the next four weeks, then add keep adding a week and see how far you can get. And maybe you can't get the thirteen weeks to start, but as you start doing it, you realize how the data can flow in and how you can work with your development team or your AP people to really figure out how to move forward. It's not letting me move to the next slide right now. The next slide is about making it visible. I don't know if somebody else on the team move to the next slide. Having some technical difficulties today. How you can make it visible. So thinking about how can you have a daily cash dashboard? How can you have a grant balance tracker to know where your money's come in, what you've billed, what should've come in, what you need to chase down? Because part of this too is thinking about, okay. We have AR we're owed. Do we have the processes in place to really track these down? And I think that's key. It's having an AP aging summary, thinking about what are we gonna pay as we move along? How do we do we pay things net 30? Are there things that we can move around? I think the chat is also not working right now. So if you have any questions, just put them in the q and a. I think that's still working. It seems Goldcast is not having the cash management today. But having a having a payroll reserve, thinking about how we can move, make sure that we're able to pay payroll as we go. Having that weekly auto report, having exceptions to know that, like, something's not coming through, something's not happening, and really moving ahead. How can we put this all in one place and really start analyzing it? And I think some of that is automating putting up this together to really think about it. And I think one of the highlights to hit is thinking about how you can manage your inflows and your reserves, thinking about do you have a ninety day thirty to sixty day cash bridge? Do you have the lifeline if you need it? If money doesn't come in, what happens? And thinking about that. Thinking about how to what are the payment windows for your various funder? Like, I'm sure your development team has read it. Have you read it? And I would say, as an asterisk, this is a good place AI can actually help. Even if you just load in those agreements to one of your AI platforms, but make sure you're kinda paying for it and making sure that there's no PII information. Putting those in and asking, okay. What do we have to do to get paid? When should I get paid? What's the timing? And rather than going for rather than spending your time reading it, there is answers with notations that you can go. And thinking about what grants do you have to and it's in the chat. What grants do you have to spend first before you can draw down and knowing I'm gonna have to front that money? And how can I front that money? So thinking about that, how do you where are your thin months? Most organizations, no problem in December with with year end, no problem at our annual gala, but there are going to be months where money just doesn't come in. And we know what kind of cycle we're on and how to kinda move through that and thinking about how to how to go about that. So then we can move to the kind of the next section, really. So we've talked about all this. What is our action plan? What can we do today? So thinking about those four topics. There are piece of paper in front of you that centralize, automate, forecast, and make visible. Think about on a scale of one to five, one being we don't do any of this and five being we are great at all this, where you would gauge your organization and how you would gauge what you're doing today as a starting point to think of where to go. And I think some of it's starting small. So what can you do this month? Set up one automated bank feed if you don't have them already Without your account balances, like I said, build a four week forecast. I think somebody said in the chat, start by budgeting this month. Build a four week cash forecast knowing what you know and using the institutional knowledge you have, pull some GL data, feed it in, and really think about it. Think about how to do it. Draft a payment approval workflow that's gonna streamline the decision making of when to pay things. And what so that's you can do today, this week, this month. And then over ninety days, you wanna turn that four month four week forecast into a thirteen week forecast. You wanna create a dashboard for your leadership. You wanna have your main bank rec done daily and really have that policy formalized. And I think a big piece of this and I'm gonna launch the last poll question now. It should show up in the poll tab. I know we're having some technical difficulties, but I hope that gets launched. And when it does, there it is. So the last poll question is launched to make sure we get it in. What's your biggest cash management challenge right now in your organization? So this will be the third and final poll question. And I think a big part of this, and the slides are available with the recording, so you're not gonna see my lovely slides with my lovely pictures. But one of the part of this is working with your team. That this cash management improvements functions way to move forward isn't just you as a CFO or you as a controller or whatever your job is. The pulse should still be there. It should be working with your team and making sure everybody is working together to move forward and to get these things done. It shows the value because I think some of these are things that once you free up your team's time, these are the things they don't like to. These are the annoying things that kind of drag down our job. So I really think it's how can we free up time and make life better for our people? Involve the staff in these discussions. Involve the staff in these discussions. Make sure they are part of these changes because they're the people who are going to to institute these these changes, and and they're gonna have to go through. Communicate the why. And I think this is the biggest thing because you're gonna change people's workflow. Why are you doing this? What is the goal? The end goal of any of these changes I'm talking about is, a, to make the people on this call's life easier because that's what I do as a consultant. But, b, it's also to allow the organization to strengthen to be a little more strategic in the way they think and move forward and move things together so that we can work together to kind of be strategic and allow our organization to really thrive and prosper. So thinking about what you can walk away from this, it's really what I would say the biggest thing is that cash forecast. If you wanna follow-up, I do have some templates I can help you work on, but really thinking about how you wanna build that. Well, like I said, one of the first places to start, let's list out all our cash flows, where our cash goes in, where our bank accounts are, what happens, and really thinking about how to do that and get that in together. And that's really the best place to start. So I think that that's pretty much where I'll leave it is there's some things to work on. I apologize for the technical difficulties we've had with some of the slides. Not sure why that one worked, but this is me. So if you have any questions or wanna walk through a template, I'd wanna I don't have a one size fits all template for something like this, but really thinking about what accounting system you're using, how your data's coming in, how you how you can work with what you have. More than happy to talk through it and figure out one that might work for you because some of them are really complicated, and some of them are super simple. So really working with how you get your data, I think, is key. So feel free to contact me. You don't need my help. I wanna thank my executive director for giving me the time today. There's a QR code to make a donation to my nonprofit. But anything else to add, Caroline, as we're wrapping up before we get to q and a? Awesome. Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. That was great. Again, sorry, guys, for some of the technical difficulties that we're having. If you weren't able to answer that last poll question, feel free to just put your first and last name in the chat, and I'll go over that and make sure that we get that counted for you. And then there are some resources. I know some people were asking about templates and connecting with you, Andrew, so I did push out a poll question. I'm not sure if people are able to answer it there. If you are interested in working with Andrew, and I'm also about to push one out as well. Just asking if you're interested in working with Blackbaud, so feel free to answer those. And then in the docs tab too, there is today's webinar slides. So I know it was a little we had did have some technical difficulties, so that should be in the docs section there as well. But you'll also be getting a recording of today's presentation as well. So thank you so much, Andrew. I appreciate your time. Yeah. So I we have a few questions. I know we're a little early on ending, so I'm gonna get to those. The only other plug I'd like to give, if you are in the Chicago area, I'll be hosting a nonprofit CFO summit the second week in April. Feel free to reach out, and I could send you that invitation. I'd love to see you there if you're in that area. If you're not, we will miss you. But so I'm gonna jump over to the questions as we wrap up. So tips on moving on from a bulky Excel bank reconciliation to the reconciliation in Blackbaud. One of the things that is hard about that is figuring out kinda what your reconciling items are and if it's something there are certain bank rack items that you always have to do in Excel. And I would say, more than happy to talk to you, but it's it's it's just that first time you do it in FE, you're gonna question everything about your life because you're gonna have to clean up a lot of old data. You're gonna have to it's gonna take longer, but as you move forward, it gets a lot easier. So I would say it's just a matter of finding a month where where losing time isn't gonna be as bad and moving on from there and thinking about how to do that. So more than happy to talk to you about that. It's it's a little bit of a challenge the first time you do it in in Blackbaud, but I would say it's something that once you do it, it's just, like, so much easier. So my tip is really to find a time where you're gonna be able to devote the time to do it. Do you have an example of a grant balance tracker? More than happy to talk to you. Like I said, I have a bunch of templates. I always say, and it's not just because I wanna work with everybody and have a consulting business. It's everything, especially in the nonprofit world, is not one size fits all. So I wanna talk to you about what your organization truly needs to get you a template that works for you. Because what works for one nonprofit, if your data looks different, it might be different. So I just I don't like giving out templates without understanding. So I'm more than happy to talk further. And thinking of the dashboard, it's really if you're if you wanna know what a dashboard look like, the first place that would actually start is with your board and your exec director. What do they wanna see? And find out what information is useful then, because I've had boards that really get into the numbers. I've also had boards that say, give me a chart or a picture. I'm not looking at a balance sheet. And so it really comes down to what does your board wanna see to make that dashboard make sense. So start there and then think of, okay. What data do I need to put this together in a form that works for me? Like I said, I I try to tailor what I give people to the organization. So thinking about that, more than happy to talk to anybody to follow-up. I know Blackbaud has some great things within the system that are kind of out of the box that you can tailor, especially if you have the dashboard. So really thinking about that. But I thank you all for bearing with me with these technical difficulties today, and thank you for your time. And I will see you all next month. Thank you so much.