Serenic Navigator vs. Grant Management Addon for Nonprofits: Which One to Choose?

#FocusOnBestPractices

Nonprofits strongly depend on donations and grants and are accountable when it comes to their funds reporting and spending. The money generated from donations, fundraising, grants, as well as other sources should be thoroughly monitored against an array of programs or projects. Accountability makes accounting an essential requirement for nonprofit organizations. Therefore, nonprofits without any kind of understanding and budget management in real-time, are prone to over-spending and failing in terms of exact visibility into the organization’s monetary efficiency. All of this and more are what’s keeping the nonprofit C-level executives awake at night.

This is where solutions like Serenic Navigator and KOR’s Grant Management addon can help.

Serenic Navigator for nonprofit organizations (NPOs) is an all-encompassing cloud-based ERP software, built on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) Business Central (BC). The comprehensive solution includes key functionalities aligned with the requirements of your NPO.

Serenic Navigator for nonprofits comes with benefits like:

  • Cost and budget transparency required to handle sources of funding and programs.
  • Consistent with NPO business processes throughout programs, divisions, and locations.
  • Several company consolidations and the capability to include intercompany transactions, thus removing the need for multiple financial statements and erroneous data entry.
  • Simply set up budget authorization needs before posting to a general ledger (GL), as well as budget what-if computation situations for enhancing precision and planning.
  • Currencies and language functionality to document and present transactions for valuations, sub-awards, commitments in chosen languages and currencies.

Though Serenic Navigator is a comprehensive add-on solution built on Dynamics NAV and Business Central for nonprofits, it is expensive thereby forcing nonprofits to look for other options.

Grant Management add-on for nonprofits from Korcomptenz

The Grant Management addon developed by KORCOMPTENZ built on Microsoft D365 BC and NAV provides competencies to assist Nonprofits such as charities, NGOs, and membership associations and organizations to comply with guidelines, and controls, and simultaneously manages funding and budgets proactively, minimizing paperwork as well as administrative operating costs for business processes. KOR’s Grant Management add-on for nonprofits is in-built within Dynamics NAV and Microsoft D365 BC.

The Grant Grant Management add-on for nonprofits development integrates prospecting, fund management, and implementation, computing indirect costs, income recognition, as well as reports for awards status, key performance indicators (KPIs), and tracking and assessing targets.

Korcomptenz’s Grant Management addon comes with some key benefits including:

  • Helpings you manage numerous budgets throughout grant life cycles.
  • Helps to prevent overspending.
  • Precise monitoring of expenses for the whole lifespan of a grant with unified, easily accessible data.
  • Provides a synopsis of exhaustive grant ID information at your fingertips.
  • Provides up-to-the-minute information about your grant status together with variance reports spanning several financial periods.
  • The add-on is cost-effective depending on your nonprofit business needs.

Key Highlights of Serenic Navigator

Serenic Navigator integrates some of these small yet remarkable features. These include:

Finance and Accounting

Better employee productivity

Serenic Navigator will help in boosting your employee productivity with an automated system for streamlining all accounting activities.

Create reports in a jiffy

With improved Serenic navigator, you can now generate reports in no time for grant compliance, period-end, as well as audits. All this is due to enhanced accessibility of data and precision.

Better monetary control

Experience improved monetary control with visibility of essential program expenditures and supporting operational data in real-time.

Data security

Now you can secure your confidential data in a safe system that only authorized users can access in your NPO.

Grant Management

Precise, on-time, and compliant grant management, as well as cooperative contracts and encouraging programs are important for NPO operation. Serenic navigator will automate the entire process so that you have more time in securing more donations in the future.

In the pre-award phase, you can:

  • Keep track of several modifications of your program estimations.
  • Keep funder documents such as terms and conditions, and plans related to the grant in a centralized place for authorized user access.
  • Post ward estimation values to your NPO budget.

When you achieved the required funding, you can:

  • Comply with donor instructions for start or end dates, goals, indirect expense computation, and terms and conditions.
  • Choose to necessitate financing incrementally or fully, and attach to forecasts and budget, as well as multi-year financing.
  • Generate sub-wards and supervise sub-awardee costs independently.
  • Make invoice regulations to make certain rightly allotted and conforming posts.
  • Keep track of real-time expenditures related to the grant. You can pull the data right from the financial systems to do away with obsolete, contradictory information.
  • Keep an eye on expenditures vs. estimations to prevent overspending or under-spending.
  • Generate progress and compliance reports for donors fast with simple access to information in the format you require.

Budgeting

Serenic navigator helps you to streamline your NPO budget and manage its life cycle to make sure your plans are implemented as you thought:

  • Permitting for allocated sub-budgets rolling into an inclusive budget, and “what-if versions” until the one is chosen for submission.
  • Offering vast control over budget adjustments, approval rules, grant management/departmental views, email notifications, and programs.
  • Showing real-time expenditures in comparison to planned amounts to minimize overspending and under-spending.

Analytics and Reporting

  • Analytics, as well as reporting, help you make informed decisions quickly. It helps you to:
  • Access all budget, financial, and transaction data stored in the system.
  • Get constant visibility into your regularly accessed financial info with pre-built dashboards for Serenic Navigator GL, awards, and payroll.
  • Empower program, regional, as well as grant managers supervise real-time efficiency and make modifications in advance using KPIs in real-time and info shown on role-based dashboards.
  • Investigate data shown in dashboards with a simple click.
  • Screen and organize real-time info to answer ad-hoc questions and generate new reports.
  • Export reports to spreadsheets for further assessment.

Key Highlights of Grant Management System

Grants Life Cycle

Prospecting(WIP)

  • Tracking every contributor, influencer, and partner contact details including administrative and personal data with adaptable tools for labeling various types.
  • Tracking of agencies, sub-agencies, as well as financing processes.
  • Tracking and documenting all contributor communications including calls, emails, social media, and additional communications).
  • Offer capacity to keep an eye on financing possibilities and deliver an integrated database of existing financing opportunities.
  • Give the capacity to create reports on contributor trends by country, area, and locality.

Grant Growth & Development

  • Keeping an eye on every grant proposal that is developing such as tracking position, time limit, major people working developing a proposal, and evaluations of project expenditures.
  • Tracking modifications of valuations during negotiations.
  • Keeping an eye on due dates as well as end dates of deliverables throughout the proposal stage.
  • Handling each document related to proposals under progress as well as encouraging cooperation on proposal creation and development.
  • Give reports on each proposal status in progress as well as advancement toward completion.
  • Document when proposals were submitted, and store files related to the finishing proposals submitted.
  • Capacity to follow fundraising efficiencies concerning defined goals.
  • Generate awards from the proposals.

Grants Management & Implementation

  • Change awards made from proposals as needed.
  • Keep an eye on all awarded grants, agreements, and record modifications.
  • Store files related to awards including files, records, spreadsheets, and illustrations.
  • Encourage the flexible design of a calendar of major targets for every grant, displaying the major grant management steps for nonprofits, files, and time limit, including reporting targets and status.
  • Keep organization charts and important points of contact on every grant, for alerts.
  • Incorporate task administration for Awards’ start-up and completion into the system, depending on pre-outlined project templates (task checklists).
  • Incorporate task administration for Awards’ start-up and completion into the system, depending on pre-outlined project templates (task checklists).
  • Supervise burn rate in contrast to outputs and duration of grant as well as project goal burn rate figures using cost work strategy.
  • Track Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) needs and targets under the Award, host M&E details such as log frames, production tracking, and the capacity to check the accessibility of M&E strategies and tools. It is also necessary to track their availability and progress concerning standard and project related KPIs with time.
  • Identify high or low programmatic and monetary effectiveness of a grant, send an alert to the grant managers.
  • Skill to keep track of details for every grant (For example, what country goal is the grant focusing on, what policies is the grant supporting, etc.).
  • Keep an eye on funds commitments.
  • Keep watch on project deliverables in decided deadlines.
  • Listing limitations, terms & conditions.
  • Documenting expenditures versus budget.

Indirect Cost Rates

Computing an Indirect Cost Rate

  • Direct costs mean materials, labor force, and other expenses incurred for an agreement.
  • Indirect expenses mean those incurred that aren’t immediately recognizable to a specific agreement or customer.
  • The objective of an indirect cost rate is to assign a permissible indirect cost to agreements or customers reasonably and impartially.
  • The indirect cost rate is merely a mathematical computation of dividing a group of expenditures (numerator) by an allocation base (denominator) such as direct workforce cost or overall direct costs and operating expense, labor hours, square feet, or for that matter machine hours.
  • The operating expense rate allotment base most frequently used is direct labor dollars.

Required setups:

  • Cost groups.
  • Indirect Rate Allotment bases.

The Indirect Rate will be determined and then used to distribute indirect expenditures to projects. In the process, unallowable expenses should be discovered and ignored in the allotment.

The system is supposed to have possibilities for organization-wide rates and award-specific rates.

There would be a distinction between the rates projected for the year and the genuine rates experienced. The expected rates are changed to tangible regularly. Necessary modifications are as follows:

  • Pay back the government for surplus cash accumulated and is described x as a responsibility when Genuine rates are lesser than the projected/authorized rates (Under-Running Rates).
  • Bill the government for the deficit and is reported as an asset – when Genuine rates are more than the projected/authorized rates (Over-Running Rates).

Revenue Identification

Completed-Contract method

The finished-contract method lets you identify revenue when the whole agreement is fulfilled; after all performance, commitments have been met. A completed contract is a better technique for shorter agreement periods to make sure income shows on financials in an accurate period.

Occasionally, this approach becomes predefined for circumstances where an organization cannot identify income on the “Percentage of completion” method due to an absence of transparency about performance responsibilities or when the agreement can’t be enforced.

Percentage of completion method

This approach is frequently used with big or long-standing agreements, allowing organizations to identify revenue per goals or other signs of improvement. This approach needs a comprehensive agreement that outlines every goal or deliverable to make it obvious when income recognition might occur.

Cost-plus-fixed-fee contracts

It is a particular kind of agreement in which the contractor is reimbursed for the regular expenditures for a project, and an extra flat fee for the services rendered.

The expenditures in a cost-plus flat fee are computed as per market values. Then, the “fixed or flat fee” part of the agreement might be depending on a discussion between the parties and can change as per the requirements of every project. Cost-plus fixed fee agreements are often described as CPFF “contracts, cost-plus contracts, cost-reimbursement contracts, and cost-plus fixed fee contracts.”

Time & Materials Contracts

It defines how a client will compensate a contractor for the time spent on a project as well as the resources they utilize in implementing the job. Contractors are paid for materials bought and offered a day or hourly rate for their work

For the revenue identification, the system to have functionalities for:

  • Recognition of performance commitments/qualifying expenditures.
  • Allotment of the transaction costs to the performance requirements.
  • Identification of income when/as performance commitments are fulfilled.

Other setups include:

  • Predefined dimensions-combination.
  • Grants categories.
  • Gift types.
  • Donor types.

Report Generation Requirements

  • Status of awards reports.
  • Key issues report such as Late Reports.
  • Outline reports on efficiency against key performance indicators and M&E targets defined for every award.
  • Dashboards related to the status of the grant per dimension(s).
  • Fund reports by contributors, award type, nation/area/division, theme, target recipients, timeframe and/or period, amounts, operating cost ratio, co-financing amounts, associates.
  • Status of co-funding.
  • Contributor ranking by ‘quality funding’ standards, to encourage donor maps and fundraising policies including government, multilateral as well as charities.
  • Status of fundraising and analytics, including a sum of money collected during a particular period classified by type: limited vs. unlimited, per country, theme, time, operating cost, etc., as and planned achievement rate.
  • Suitability of donor reporting and cash collection, for every contributor, and future time limit for reports, cash assortment.
  • Effectiveness of grant depends on accordance with grants’ management documents’ targets including contributor reporting.

Microsoft D365 BC & Korcomptenz Grant Management addon for Nonprofits

Nonprofits can now supercharge themselves with D365 Business Central and KOR’s addon. A webinar was conducted on the same.

Conclusion

Whether you are a new nonprofit organization or a leading one, Korcomptenz is a Microsoft gold-certified partner that combines technical skills and industry experience to offer robust ERP solutions to worldwide organizations. We provide customized, all-inclusive grant management solutions to boost your productivity, streamline complex business processes, and simplify experiences.

Based on your nonprofit’s needs, choose the ERP solution that best suits your NPO’s needs. We’ve assisted nonprofits to manage their grant applications seamlessly. Contact us for a free consultation today.

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