Item: MIP Fund Accounting
Rating: 8
Author: Pat Chase

Overall Satisfaction with Abila MIP Fund Accounting

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

There are only three staff working in MIP: accountant, admin and me as the grants manager. In my role I work the financial side of grants and contracts. This entails creating the "vendor", identifying payment schedules, releasing funds and running various reports for Program staff. I also supervise the admin responsible for entering recurring invoices, processing donations and reconciliation. We are in the process of creating a step-by-step procedures manual for these aspects for transition and backup.

Pros and Cons

Pros

As an individual without accounting background, I find the process of creating a vendor easy and intuitive.
Releasing payments and modifying payment schedules is quick and easy; allowing for the unique modifications some of our grantees require.

Cons

From my point of view the major con is the grant intake form our accountant created for grantees to be "vendors" within the MIP system. Very cumbersome. Too much irrelevant information for the financial side of the grant-making process. Will need to discuss how to modify/simply this process going forward.
I would like to see a simplified way to get vendor payment activity information. I often have to look up check and $ amount for grant tracking. I know how to do it, but the steps to identify the appropriate report and vendor identification to viewing the data is slow and cumbersome compared to other activities in MIP.

Return on Investment

This is a question for our accountant and president. What I do know is that it allows us to increase our "donor advised funds" and offer that as a means for individuals to contribute to our cause.

Effectiveness at Managing Multiple Fund Sources

Yes! That is why we moved to MIP. So far this year we have received significant funding from two different sources requiring different tracking requirements. We have two more strongly potential multi-year grants pending. Being able to track the expenses based on each grant and fund is critical for efficiency of reporting. Efficient for not just the accountant, but program staff so needless time isn't spent tracking data in excel.

Alternatives Considered

As mentioned earlier, we came from Community Pearl accounting/grant-making/fundraising. It did not allow for the multiple fund tracking like MIP does. We couldn't be happier.

Likelihood to Recommend

As noted in the previous question I discussed the grant-making "vendor" process and need to simplify - albeit on our end, not yours. The fund accounting aspect is what we needed given grant dollars needing to be billed to various and multiple different funds. That's the reason we moved to MIP and it is serving our needs very well. Other aspects I find challenging are more internal user - the adage of garbage in/garbage out. Internally we need to be better with coding billable activities to the right account and not "assuming" especially since it was done one way before doesn't constitute an always.

MIP Fund Accounting Feature Ratings

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Non-profit grant-making point of view