Whitepaper

Tame your wild not-for-profit chart of accounts with dimensions

Aug. 1, 2022

Without the right accounting software, your not-for-profit chart of accounts (COA) can become unwieldy. Many not-for-profits find it difficult to sift through ever-multiplying COAs with thousands of unique account numbers to create reports or fix errors during close.

Most traditional financial management solutions force you to set up a separate expense account for each segment. For example, to track 15 projects, from six locations, with five departments each, you would need 450 account code combinations. What would happen if you needed to filter transactions by multiple factors? Having a bloated COA makes it time-consuming and difficult to quickly get the information your not-for-profit needs.

Thankfully, there is a better way to organize financial information to make not-for-profit accounting faster and more efficient: Dimensions. Modern cloud financial management solutions, like Sage Intacct, help not-for-profits keep their COA tamed and simple using table-driven architecture to structure data around logic-based dimensions. Read on to find out how a dimensional chart of accounts provides better visibility an reduces complexity, simplifying your COA.

Using dimensions to tame your COA 

Traditional accounting systems for not-for-profits have complicated and wieldy chart of accounts and are unable to track all the granular data organizations need. Sage Intacct’s multidimensional chart of accounts provides a flexible foundation to maintain greater stewardship, gain deeper financial visibility with greater context, and make more informed decisions with real time analytics.

In Sage Intacct, you can define the key attributes you want to use in accounting and reporting, such as grant, project, class, department, program, location, and more. You can also rename or repurpose a standard dimension to fit your needs – for example, you can rename class to fund to track revenue and expenses against different funds.

Not-for-profit organizations can keep their COA simple by eliminating the need to create so many account numbers with multidimensional accounting. You can do this by simply “tag” transactions with dimensions to add financial and operational context to your data. Tags make it easy to sort and search for data for reporting with meaningful context.