Every dollar that a nonprofit can save through better financial management translates to more services that can be delivered.  Here are some creative ways to save dollars or expand revenue.

1.  Reward Staff for Saving Money

Work with your management team to develop some way all staff can participate in saving money. Examples include reducing paper, ink and copy costs; cutting back on long distance charges; reducing mileage, and other things. Make sure that everyone can participate in the program, and the the rewards are considered to be fair.

2. Zero-Based Budgeting

This is both a management tool and a budgeting process.  Managers should have each staff member responsible for a program involved in preparing their own portion of the budget.  Each portion should include three levels of expected growth<197>cutback, maintenance to moderate growth, and substantial growth.

As budgets are developed and consolidated into a departmental and organizational budget, ask these questions:

• What is the minimum required, and how do we justify that?
• What could be done at each level to anticipate new services needed, the workload for staff/volunteers, and funding available?
• How do we priorities programs?
• Where do we plan cuts?

3.  Form Management

Staff time can often be more effectively used by routinizing forms for reporting, correspondence, and financial requests and reports. Analyze areas where staff spend their most time writing and reporting, and develop some standardized forms. Pefore developing forms, discuss ideas with the management, and ask that they discuss suggested forms with staff for their input. If staff and make common forms for areas  frequently used, then they can be a time saver.

4. Information Technology

IT can help your agency save time and cut costs. For example, people working on a project together can discuss issues online and meet using Sype. Although in-person meetings are always important, most situations to not require in-person meetings all the time. Staff can save travel time and costs by having more meetings online. Project can often be finished sooner when update are circulated to all committee members.

Long distance call charges are fast becoming a thing of the past as agencies opt into unlimited use plans. People can schedule phone meetings or Skype, where meetings used to be scheduled through the phone company at a very high cost.

5. Supply Management

Consider a stockless (or just-in-time stocked) supply room.  Many stores are willing to deliver supplies on short notice.  You will have more effeciency in having just what you need.  The room for supplies could be used for other purposes.

Office supply and materials costs can vary by 30% or more with careful purchasing.  State nonprofit associations and other associations can provide excellent cost savings on supplies. Keep track of costs for comparisons and seek competitive bids on all work. Your organization may have repetitive programs with predictable trend lines on expenses.

6. Careful Trend Tracking

Identify expense areas that you determine to be important (perhaps items in the budget that represent 3% or more of your expenses). Keep track of previous years expenses to help you project where you are in the current year.  For example, you might have a particular service which is ordered during a certain time of the year.  In previous years, you would have received a certain number of requests by a specified date. If this year’s count is over or under that amount, you can adjust your budget, marketing, and workload accordingly<197>rather than waiting until after the fact to deal with the issue.