How Time Tracking Increases Donor Confidence
Donors want to see that a non-profit serves the greater good and doesn’t just benefit the people who run it.
Organizations that conceal their financial information or are unable to show fund expenditure will fail to attract decent funding. They may even fail to secure it altogether.
In contrast, a non-profit that can account for every cent and where/how it was spent will have a much easier time convincing donors. Doing this shows they are a responsible and credible organization.
Inspire Trust with My Hours
Using My Hours to track time will provide you with all the data required to inspire donor confidence.
Full Transparency
One of the biggest ways to build donor trust is by maintaining full transparency. Specifically, on how your non-profit’s existing resources are allocated and how efficiently they are managed.
One of the best ways to demonstrate this is through time-tracking reporting.
My Hours allows you to generate multiple types of reports for this purpose:
- The dashboard report is perfect for giving a high-level overview of time spent and fund use.
- Timesheet reports offer insights into how each team member spends their time
- Detailed reports are best for in-depth analysis of a non-profit’s time management. The data can be customized as needed with work and time broken down by projects, tasks, or a specified time period.
Reports can be generated into visual graphs and charts in PDF format, or the raw data can be downloaded into XLS format. Save your report settings and schedule automatic email sending for regular donor reporting.
Acting with Integrity
Your non-profit will be viewed as responsible provided you can demonstrate how it remains accountable. So, making sure all logged hours are verified and approved shows a commitment to honesty.
My Hours has streamlined timesheet validation to make it easy and convenient for approvals to take place:
- The system can automatically send out reminders on a daily or weekly basis to those who have forgotten to complete their timesheets.
- Supervisors are notified by email whenever a timesheet is ready for approval, and they can approve or reject it with a single click.
- All approved timesheets can be exported as a PDF file for use with payroll and other relevant departments.
Importantly, My Hours tracks all changes to timesheets before they are approved. This creates a full – and transparent – audit trail that can be generated into a report when needed.
Impact Measurement
To attract additional donor funding, you must show how your non-profit’s resources have already delivered results.
The data accumulated in My Hours gives you essential insights into your non-profit’s performance:
- You can monitor and analyze the time-tracking data you accumulate. This allows you to understand how team members use their time on various projects and tasks.
- You can also monitor the project's progress. This makes it easier to meet the deadlines and deliverables for each project.
The productivity and performance of each individual team member can also be analyzed.
Operational Efficiency
Full transparency over fund expenditure is probably one of the most crucial things you need to do to gain donor confidence. Also, you'll need this info whenever your non-profit is audited.
My Hours has the capability for you to track budgets and expenses against your projects:
- Assign overall budgets for projects or break budgets down and assign one for each of a project’s tasks
- Set labor rates (default or project specific) for each team member so their time counts toward budget expenditure
- To help keep closer tabs on the budget when nearing project completion, the system will notify you when 80% of a budget has been spent
- Set up expense categories for other expenditures (such as equipment, travel, etc.) within projects and tasks. Create custom expense fields for things like mileage and vehicle use.
- Receipts and invoices can be uploaded into My Hours, so you have a full paper trail of expenses.
Team members who have to travel can track expenses on the go by downloading the My Hours mobile app.
Using the expense report, you can see precisely where resource management can be improved and optimized.
Final Thoughts
My Hours is set up to make it as easy as possible for non-profits to track time.
Tracking time isn’t a large or difficult job. Yet, doing it can have a profoundly positive impact. This is especially true when it comes to attracting the attention of large funding opportunities.
Besides this, effective time tracking also ensures your organization complies with the stringent rules in grant terms and regulations. Something no non-profit should ignore.
