By Stephanie Elsen

Looking for nonprofit accounting software? Good budget management is a crucial component of the system you choose. Here are some questions to ask vendors about budget management tools.

• Can individual budgets be created for entity levels within the organization such as by projects, departments, and funds, with individual reporting capability and the ability to roll budgets together for overall organization totals?
• Can the application create new budgets from previous history actuals with the logic of adjusting the new budget numbers by a percentage, flat amount, etc.
• If department heads are responsible for their own budgeting, can the application export an entity budget to Excel®, allowing a department head to create their own budget numbers and then import the information back into the related entity budget?
• Can the application allow for customized budget reporting and provide options to report by entity all the way up to organizational totals over different time periods.

Ask the right questions and you’ll be on your way to getting a system that can meet your organization’s budgeting needs.