Business Central for Charities and Non-Profit Organizations

How can Business Central help organize and automate the work of a charity, non-profit organization, or public association? Using a recently implemented humanitarian aid accounting project as an example, we would like to demonstrate the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for charities, non-profits, or public organizations. After all, such organizations need to keep records and report to international partners and donors in a transparent and timely manner.

Another important element in the implementation of an ERP system is the availability of an audit trail, which makes it impossible to edit financial transactions and postings, and provides an additional aspect of trust when interacting with international donors.

In our project (NDA) we had the task of consolidating the accounting into two categories:

1. Humanitarian aid, nutritional and medical support to community members, paid for by budgetary funds.
2. Distribution of humanitarian aid received from donors (sponsors).

This process was not formalized by the client, they did not always understand where everything was and there was no clear accounting. The client’s main objective was to make the process transparent.

In the course of the project, we transferred the following components to Business Central:

1. Accounting for what was received from donors and what was purchased from suppliers.
2. Creation of individual aid packages and menus for feeding IDPs.
3. Transferring humanitarian aid to smaller structural units.

Based on the data recorded in the system, the customer can generate changes for donors, monitor real stock levels, and quickly transfer information between structural units and employees.

Understanding that this is a non-profit organization, we tried to use the standard functionality of the system as much as possible and adapt it to the client’s needs and accounting specifics. For example:

• Donors were entered in the Suppliers directory.
• Clients were entered in the Clients directory.
• Accordingly, the receipt of humanitarian aid was recorded through a purchase order,
• The transfer of humanitarian aid to the client was recorded by a sales order.
• We also used the assembly order to create individual aid packages.

This allowed us to implement the project quickly, provide maximum transparency and a single point of accountability for the client, and simplify reporting to key donors.