The Importance of Budgeting for a Board Portal
Budgeting is something that gives leaders peace of mind. A little upfront planning alleviates a lot of problems as the year goes on. Having a budget supports an organisation’s business plan by mapping out the financial landscape for the coming year. A healthy and realistic budget accounts for income, helps control expenditures, and aids in profitability. The importance of budgeting in an organisation accounts for expected and unexpected costs so that sudden surprises in costs don’t bankrupt the company. An organisation’s budget provides the means to solve problems in a systematic and reasonable manner. Leaders use the budget as a tool to help them become good stewards of the company’s funds.
A board portal creates efficiency and cost-savings in many ways and the savings in labor, time, and material costs can be better allocated to planning for growth and prosperity. There is a cost for a board portal service. Because the benefits far outweigh the expense, it’s worthwhile to have a board portal. By budgeting to include a board portal service, leaders cover one of the most important bases in the line items for their overall annual budget.
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Why Budgeting Is Important
Budgets ensure that organisations have the proper cash flow to manage monthly expenses. A budget ensures that there are no unmanageable financial surprises and that the organisation is making the most efficient use of resources. Most organisations have some fluctuation in their cycles and seasons which inevitably have an impact on the budget.
Most importantly, an annual budget supports all the things an organisation plans to do according to its business plan and mission. The various steps in the budgeting process include:
- Forecasting revenue
- Material planning
- Labor
- Marketing
- Fixed costs
- Monthly cash requirements
- Pro forma financial statements
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Why Budgeting for a Board Portal Is Important
Organisations can’t function without leadership. One of the biggest expenses for leadership is the cost of board meetings. Meeting preparation costs an organisation in time, labor costs, and materials. A board portal system streamlines the process of board meeting preparation.
The major costs in board meetings are materials which are primarily the board book and all the reports contained in it. Along with preparing the board book, there are additional costs related to wear and tear on the office equipment, labor for copying and collating pages, assembling the board book, and distributing board books.
A board portal saves substantially on many of the board’s routine activities including communication, meeting planning, and committee work. The more that boards save on their regular duties, the more time and energy they can commit to strategy, oversight, and innovation. A board portal service provider that responds quickly to issues with system troubles prevents downtime. The best board portal service providers provide customer service every day of the year and around the clock.
Over the last several years, governance has been evolving. Modern organisations need the right digital tools to keep up with ever-changing best practices for governance. It’s vital for corporations to keep up with new laws and regulations to remain in continual compliance. In general, there’s a greater focus on governance practices than ever before.
With the prevalence and high cost of data breaches, it’s less cost-effective to have a board portal system than it is not to have one. BoardEffect has security features that are robust and regularly updated. Subpar security standards can create data breaches or other urgencies that cost time and money, as well as affect the organisation’s reputation. In-house IT teams often aren’t budgeted well enough to have the necessary manpower, sophistication, and time that’s necessary to ward off cybercrime.
As governance evolves, BoardEffect innovates and evolves to meet the need. Cybercriminals are getting better at their craft daily. Boards need a board portal that can keep up with the best of the hackers. A full-service board portal like BoardEffect provides the proper security audits and penetration testing to anticipate the next move of cybercriminals and keep them at bay.
Importance of Secure and Accessible Document Storage
Many, if not most companies are moving from paper file cabinets to cloud storage because of security and convenience. While those are important reasons for moving to cloud storage, it’s important not to overlook the ability to access documents when needed and to limit access to documents with sensitive, personal, or protected information. For this reason, a full-featured board portal includes the granular-based authorisation.
The search engine feature on a board portal opens up accessibility for documents where meetings are subject to sunshine laws and open meeting acts or if organisations need quick access to documents for legal reasons.
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Why BoardEffect Is the Best for Your Budget
BoardEffect is a full-service portal provider that regularly conducts security audits and penetration tests. The annual subscription fee covers all security updates, training, customer service, ADA-mandated adaptations, and governance-related updates.
Low-cost board portal software jeopardises privacy, opens up risks, and doesn’t allow the technology to grow as governance evolves and changes grow in the realm of nonprofits, healthcare, higher education, community banking, and even start-ups. Why subject your organisation to having to hire expensive consultants, add costly upgrades, or bring in training at an additional cost when BoardEffect covers all these things with one fully featured board management meeting software solution.
From a compliance standpoint, BoardEffect helps to eliminate fines or penalties for not being compliant with open-meeting laws, open requirements, and ADA requirements.
Overall, a board portal system is one of the most important tools that modern boards need to have to perform their responsibilities of planning and oversight well. A quality board portal system aids in good governance and effective planning for the current period and smoothly transitions into the future. The importance of budgeting in an organisation is vital to the health and well-being of any organisation. A board portal assists in budgeting because it streamlines so many of the activities that board members are responsible for that are static. The costs of a board portal system are predictable which means that the final cost can be included in your annual budget under meeting and governance expenses.
Related article: Why a Board Portal will improve the performance of your Not-for-Profit Board
