Knowing how to manage financial resources effectively is essential for achieving financial sustainability. This means gaining financial knowledge and understanding all the ways to generate income, where effective financial management procedures are subject to a series of institutional policies that help it achieve its goals by maximizing the use of its resources and ensuring transparency in its financial management. Furthermore, through these procedures, the organization can forecast its financial status and make appropriate decisions in a timely manner, which also allows it to generate income through the financial management of available assets.
Therefore, administrative and accounting procedures should align with the needs of the organization, regardless of its scope
and structure. These procedures should also record the organization's transactions to enable it to visualize the financial future of the organization as a whole. In many organizations, accounting procedures are set according to the project or by donors, as this simplifies the issuance of donor reports that often require specific accounting categories and codes.
However, to know the overall budget or to calculate the total expenses in a certain category, accountants add the figures from each project and this is usually a very dangerous practice, as it does not contain enough controls for the organization, or lacks automatic review of the organization's financial status, and this type of "project" or donor-based accounting is prone to human error. Therefore, all institutions should have a cost accounting center that allows for double entry coding for donor reports and data produced for decision-making purposes, which is no less important than accounting procedures.
Generating private income is one way for an organization to diversify its revenue sources and it needs to know the ways it can generate unrestricted income and track its revenue. In other words, it refers to the income that the organization decides to spend, and not the donor, unlike contributing to an endowment fund aimed at benefiting the organization from the produced benefits of the capital while maintaining or increasing its value over time.
The organization can include a designated percentage of the endowment or trust fund among the indirect costs or what is called general expenses, and this percentage forms a surplus. To do this, the organization must legally establish the endowment and must include this investment under its indirect costs as a matter within institutional policy.
The legal establishment of an endowment fund usually consists of creating a separate bank account that the organization commits not to spend, and the purpose of establishing this account is that the increasing interest forms income for the organization, and banks already have standard procedures for creating these funds in many countries.
Establishing an institutional policy to include this investment among indirect costs explains that the same percentage of these costs will be included in every proposal, so that all donors receive equal treatment. For example, if the organization's indirect costs are calculated at 15%, a proportional amount for building the endowment fund can be added to these costs, so starting from the establishment of the fund, the organization's indirect costs would be 16% instead of 15%.
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