MIP review by a Community Action Agency
September 13, 2016
MIP review by a Community Action Agency
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Abila MIP Fund Accounting
MIP Fund Accounting is used to maintain all fiscal records for our agency and some outside agencies that we are Fiscal Agent for. We use it to provide program managers with information on how their programs are doing, pay vendors, cash management, payroll to employees and participants, and to provide information to our funders for claiming.
- Provide information in a variety of time periods, fiscal year, grant period, or custom time periods in either a detail or summary style.
- The ability to track information in a variety of ways, by program, by subsections of a program, by department, by division, by agency, by county, by project, and etc.
- The ability to enter budgets in the way our agency wishes to track them and to be able to compare the budgets to the actual costs in the time frame we want.
- The ability to import from an Excel spreadsheet is a nice feature.
- We would like to show budget, actual expense, and encumbered expenses in the same report so that we could compare budgets to a combined total of actual costs and encumbered costs.
- We would like the payroll module to stop allocating benefits on both salary and expenses. If you use Microix to track employee expenses, like mileage, MIP will use the expenses and the salary, from Microix, as the basis for benefit allocation. Only the salary should be used.
- MIP does not recalculate annual leave balances when an employee's salary changes so we have to use an outside program to calculate the revisions and import it back to MIP. Our old accounting software, Fundware, was able to make this calculation.
- The allocation module is so complex that our auditors and monitors where unable to follow the path. This had to do with the number of segments we used. We now allocate on a spreadsheet and import to MIP.
- As a non-profit, our main business objectives are to stay within regulations so that we may be paid by our funders and continue to contract with them..MIP allows us to track information to assist in this objective.
- Cash management is very important, since we are often paid in arrears. MIP helps us track cash and outstanding program balances.
The use of segments in our accounting codes allows us to track revenues and expenses in a number of ways. We use the dates of the contract for reporting purposes in order to track all of our grants and contracts according to their individual time lines.
- Fundware, GMS and Blackbaud CRM
GMS was not 2000 compliant. Fundware was sold and went out of business. A number of peers in related organizations used MIP and recommended it. This is helpful when you have a problem or a desire to try something new, and can sound it off of others that are familiar with product and the programs you run.