Financial Analyzer 

Financial Analysis: Why? • How big is the sector? How is it doing financially? • Revenues, expenses, “profits” (net income) • Private contributions • Earned income • Assets and liabilities • Financial ratios • Are organizations financially stable? • Do they have “money in the bank” for a rainy day? 

Getting Started Click on Financial Analyzer from the Main Navigation Bar. Then choose Financial Analzyer Wizard. 

Here’s a sample table showing the number of organizations and their basic finances by county. 

Here’s a sample table showing the their basic finances, but this time on a graph and grouped by the type or activity of the organization. 

The Report Wizard: 6 Questions To create your own custom table or graph, the Platform walks you through a series of questions and options. If you don’t like the result, you can always go back to the beginning of the process and revise your selections. (All your previous settings will be saved.) 

The Report Wizard: 6 Questions Filters: What organizations do you want to include? What columns: Point in time or trends? Total amounts? Indicator averages? What row groupings? Layout: Table or graph? 

#1 Report Style The Financial Analyzer can be used for a wide variety of different analyses. The first choice is whether you want to look at trends from year to year or compare organizations at a fixed point in time (typically the most recent year). Table format is ideal for copying and pasting into Excel, Word or Powerpoint but you can also create graphs that can be added to documents as well. When you are done on this page, click either of the two green arrows to continue. 

#1 Report Style If you choose a Trend report, the Platform will ask you for starting and ending dates. In general, we have data for key variables (revenue, expenses, assets, liabilities, net assets, net income, program service revenue, etc.) dating back to 1989. The more detailed data needed for some of the ratios, however, is typically limited to recent years so ratio trend information may not be available. BE SURE TO CHOOSE WHETHER YOU WANT TO VIEW “ACTUALS” (total revenue, expenses, assets, etc.) or “RATIOS”. 

#2 Groupings What do you want to see on each ROW of your table or on each BAR of your chart? As we showed in the earlier table and graph, users often want to compare financial activities by county or group the nonprofit sector into arts, education, health care, etc. and see how they compare. This is the page where you make that selection…. Or choose from a variety of other choices as well. 

#3 Actuals Here’s where you select what columns you want to see on your report if you chose “Actuals” in Step #1. 

#3 Choose a Ratio Here’s where you select what financial ratio you want to analyze in your report if you chose “Ratios” in Step #1. 

#3 Filters Last step! Let’s say that you want to include ONLY organizations in your zip code, city, or county. Or perhaps you only want to see how different types or sizes of arts organizations are doing. Here’s where you set your FILTER to limit what goes into the report by location, size, activity or a range of other filtering options. When you are done, simply click on the green Next arrow to see your graph or table. 

Sample Report– Financial Activity (“Actuals”), by County: Here’s the example we showed earlier in the is this presentation. We hope that you now have a good sense about how to create it for yourself. 

Sample Report– Financial Activity (“Actuals”), by Custom List: Here’s the same report layout, but this time grouped by whether or not the organizations were part of a specific custom list. See the Tutorial on working with Custom Lists to learn more. 

What’s the question you want to answer? 3 ways to think about ratios. Sample Report– Surplus Margin Ratio, by Major NTEE Activity Code: Here’s an example of a Ratio report. Please continue this Tutorial to learn more about interpreting the report. 

Ratios: What’s the question? • What’s typical for organizations? – Median – the value in the middle • I care equally about the financial health of all organizations, large and small, in my coalition. On average, how are they doing? – Unweighted mean • I fund a lot of organizations. If the big ones are in trouble, that’s big trouble for me. I want to see the financial performance of the group as a whole. How is it doing overall? – Weighted mean 

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• Copy and paste into a spreadsheet. • Tip: Widen the fields in your spreadsheet first. • You can quickly change the setting on one page -- say, change the ratio – and rerun the report with all the other settings the same. • Then quickly combine your reports in a spreadsheet. • Use the Windows Snipping Tool to save a graph or embed it in a document. What’s Next? To open the “Snipping Tool” in Windows 7, search for “Snipping” in the Windows Start menu (lower left corner of the screen) to quickly copy the graph and paste it into a Word, Powerpoint or other document. 

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