Ultimate Guide: Microsoft Dynamics Business Central for Nonprofits

Microsoft TSI is a philanthropic movement launched by the company back in 2017, aiming to empower nonprofits to leverage Microsoft technology. By choosing Microsoft Dynamics Business Central for nonprofits, you can significantly improve your NPO’s efficiency and productivity to ensure the timely completion of your mission. 

The Dynamics 365 Business Central is an all-in-one package deal for companies already using Office 365 products. It is a fully integrated infrastructure that offers connectivity across multiple business processes and technologies, making everything function seamlessly across the network.  

Today, it’s compulsory to have a strong grip on productivity tools if organisations want to stay ahead of the competition. Diving into Business Central for nonprofits with the help of our experts can help maximise your reach to potential donors when raising funds to support your cause. 

What Is Dynamics 365 Business Central?

A framework specially designed to evolve depending on your business needs is Dynamics 365 Business Central by Microsoft. As the name suggests, it is a business management solution for small to medium-sized organisations under stiff scrutiny and pressure to deliver results under constrained budgets.  

In such circumstances, having a consolidated solution is crucial since it automates and streamlines business processes for easier management. With Business Central, companies can easily add functionalities relevant to their region of operation, customizable to handle even the highly specialised industries. 

These days everyone is aware of the extensive costs behind implementing the ERP and CRM solutions in organisations. Hence, with Dynamics 365, you can easily limit the time your developers spend configuring custom links to make all systems work smoothly. Also, this allows you to stay within the tight limitations of your budget.

Unlock the potential of Dynamics 365 Business Central

Business Central offers unrivalled connectivity across multiple business processes within an organisation. Hence, to understand the power of harnessing this technology, let’s delve into some of the advantages it offers:

Smarter and improved customer service

Microsoft Business Central provides exceptional customer service that overviews employee resources, workloads, and tasks. Aids in speeding up the quoting process and responding to sale-related inquiries more effectively. Additionally, the solution helps in prioritising sales by uptaking cross-sell and up-sell opportunities throughout the sales lifecycle.

Budget-friendly and time-framed project deliveries

The platform provides users with advanced reporting that maximises job efficiency by making decisions based on real-time data on resources. The data allows for staying within budget as projects can adapt to the available timelines and resources. You can also analyse the post-project data to improve the overall effectiveness.

Precisely managed financials

A perfect tool that gives faster and more accurate reporting on your financial position with integrated Power BI dashboards. For reliable forecasting, you can oversee, model, and analyse the data across the whole of your business profile. Furthermore, it helps in streamlining finances like accounts receivable and payable.

Supply chain automation and security

Business Central for nonprofits helps calculate reorder points, stock levels, and lead times by suggesting alternatives after a product becomes unavailable. Also, you can benefit from the automatic visibility of supplier payment records and avoid overdue penalties, thus maximising profitability. 

Highly optimised operations

The optimization offered by business central ensures timely product deliveries by streamlining manufacturing and warehouse operations. You can meet customer demands by optimising the manufacturing capacity and introducing stock reporting to polish production schedules.

The vision behind Dynamics 365 for Nonprofits

The Dynamics 365 for nonprofits is designed keeping in mind the challenges faced by not-for-profit organisations. They offer a plethora of features that assist philanthropies with upgrading their procedures and limiting their expenses. Additionally, the Dynamics 365 instance associated with nonprofits builds strong relationships with donors and volunteers whose help plays an essential part in keeping these nonprofit companies alive.

With Dynamics 365, you can easily manage donor engagement by spotting trends and seeing what helps strengthen relationships so they can have a better bearing in the future. Also, membership schemes for nonprofits aid in accessing previous interactions and relationships. Let’s explore some advantages of Dynamics for not-for-profit bodies:

• Upgraded donor engagement will help attract, retain and grow donors.

• Deeper customer insights to align marketing and fundraising teams.

• Enhanced marketing enables nonprofits to personalise outreach to donors.

• Building lifelong donor loyalty that empowers teams with streamlined data and unified technology.

Why move to the Cloud with Dynamics 365 Business Central?

Nonprofit organisations are working on a tight budget – so they should learn to play their game smartly. They must save up here and there so their businesses can run smoothly. If they’re continuously juggling spreadsheets and are dependent on tribal knowledge to manage their businesses, they are in for a ride that might not end how they expected.

With modern cloud-based solutions like Dynamics Business Central for nonprofits, you can gain access to all the vital information you need. The four reasons below tell you why you need to move your nonprofit business to Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Limited IT resources

Nonprofits either use the on-location staff to handle the on-premise software or outsource the job to an external firm. These teams also supervise the network security and data backups of an organisation. These practices cause extensive burdens, and based on a report by Total Economic Impact, deploying Business Central can help mitigate around $40,000 in costs compared to the previously mentioned solution.

When you have Business Central in the cloud, you only need to pay monthly or annually based on the related servers and equipment you utilise. Microsoft Dynamics Business Central for nonprofits has one of the most sturdy network security solutions with built-in backups. Therefore, it is crucial to maintain and upgrade the system as required.

Require assistance with remote teams

After the pandemic has ushered a rise in remote workplaces, many have migrated to Business Central for better remote assistance. The dynamics solutions have helped them save labour and reach greater efficiencies for team members working in different locales. Additionally, this has helped in easier and more accurate reporting from afar.  

Using third-party services for generating reports

Nonprofit organisations have complex reporting requirements. If manually putting together information isn’t working, Business Central integrated with Power BI will help resolve all their queries. Dynamics Business Central for nonprofits leverages cloud-based Excel integration with Power BI to generate its own highly detailed reports. 

Deployed manual process requiring extensive training programs

When working on tight budgets and limited resources, you need to be as productive as possible. Dynamics 365 Business Central with Tangicloud Fundamentals makes it possible to achieve all in a limited time frame. With industry-specific solutions for nonprofits, you do not need to customise your software for everyday industry practices.

Benefits of Dynamics 365 hosted by Azure for Nonprofits

Choosing the most optimal CRM platform for your organisation is very crucial. Therefore, if you’re still on the fence and unable to figure out whether your nonprofit should move to Dynamics 365 or not, below are a few benefits that can help you decide. 

Maintain consistent operations

The 360-degree perspective by Dynamics 365 helps build a better understanding of what your organisation offers. Since nonprofits have offices and branches at various locations, the solution is very beneficial to help streamline processes with automation. You will have an overview of what everyone is up to and help maintain consistent business operations.

Grant management

Dynamics 365 helps you track numerous grant opportunities – from procedures to grant awards. You can also use Dynamics to create reminders for the renewal of grants. Furthermore, you can control and restrict access to certain people and avoid duplication and confusion on who should apply. 

Volunteer and Donor management

Volunteer and donor management is an essential part of what nonprofits do regularly. Dynamics 365 can help track volunteers to ensure that they are treated with the utmost respect, as this may even help you retain the same ones for a long time. Given how nonprofits have limited stocks in hand, this can be highly beneficial for the companies in the future. 

Email communication

Dynamics Business Central for nonprofits gives the ability to efficiently manage email marketing as most NPOs rely on email communications to update their donors on upcoming events. With targeted contact segments, you can inform all previous donors who might be interested in similar projects. It also helps outline campaign analytics, enabling companies to compile reports and better understand the campaign pitch.

Social media outreach

If any organisation wants to reach potential donors, it will need a solid social media approach. Dynamics CRM can combine with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Users can easily schedule postings for social media platforms via Dynamics 365.

Modernised business processes

Built customer applications to automate routine processes with Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Automate. With no-code and low-code apps, even people not from the skilled side can utilise these apps to their benefit. Companies can embed Power BI reports within a team’s workplace.

Leverage the common data model

The data schema from Microsoft and its partners is called the Common Data Model. It constitutes the management, fundraising, awards, deliveries, and impact tracking. The nonprofit accelerator extends the standardised Common Data Model, including sample apps and data, dashboards, and documentation.

What Is Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator?

Microsoft is dedicated to developing solutions based on the attributes the nonprofits commonly use for constituent management, fundraising, program deliveries, and impact tracking. Hence, the Microsoft Dynamics nonprofit accelerator provides them with a uniform platform to utilise the added benefits provided by this framework. Users who want to connect and extend the Dynamics 365 platform and the Microsoft Power Platform can benefit from integrating the Common Data Model for nonprofit organisations.

What sets Dynamics 365 Business Central for nonprofits apart?

The Dynamics 365 is a modular solution where you can pick and add the functions you want to use. With Dynamics Business Central, you get an all-in-one solution offering integration with a wide range of modules, positioned perfectly for the SME audience. 

Dynamics 365 provides two ERP solutions: Business Central and Finance and Operations. Let’s dig deeper into the differences between the two frameworks.

Microsoft Finance and Operations aims to elevate your financial performance with swift reporting, robust production planning, scheduling, process planning, and cost management. The framework enables automating your supply chain management, increasing logistics fulfilment, and easily integrated into apps you already utilise.

Microsoft Business Central’s primary goal is to create silos solutions to facilitate effective and machine-driven tasks. The framework also gives you valuable insights into your business-connected data and analytics, with solutions that can adapt according to your business needs as it grows or alters.

Conclusion

This article paints a clear picture of how both Azure for nonprofits and Dynamics 365 Business Central can combine to help companies stay ahead of competitors and avoid unforeseen pitfalls. Both platforms enable nonprofits to add value to their clients and simplify their business processes while also improving productivity. 

Get in touch with our experts to learn more about how Dynamics 365 Business Central can help your non-profit organisation.