Welcome to FastFund Online! As a nonprofit accounting professional, establishing a reliable, interconnected financial ecosystem is the first step toward effective stewardship. FastFund provides a seamless Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that brings together fiscal, development, and payroll responsibilities into one platform.
In this lesson, we will explore the seven core features of FastFund that work together to handle all your financial transactions and reporting.
Your Company Data is the starting point for proper fiscal management and is securely located in the Administration section. This area houses your organization’s foundational details, including your business name, federal and state tax IDs, primary address, and the first month of your fiscal year.
[INSERT SCREENSHOT: Display the ‘Company Edit’ window highlighting the Company Details fields such as Business Name, Tax IDs, and Contact Information.]
Additionally, you can configure critical system Preferences here, setting your time zone, currency, check printing format, and labels for your cost centers.
The key to utilizing the full potential of FastFund is the proper structure of your Chart of Accounts. The system is designed to give you complete flexibility, allowing you to define an account number with up to six independent segments.
At a minimum, your account format must contain a three-segment structure:
[INSERT SCREENSHOT: Display the ‘Account Number Preview’ screen showing the Segment Digits and Cost Center Label drop-downs.]
FastFund uses a table-driven Chart of Accounts Linker that validates your account numbers throughout the transaction entry process, ensuring stricter internal controls and highly reliable postings.
FastFund uses specific Lists to help you efficiently manage your fiscal information, providing quick and dependable entry of accounts, vendors, clients, and donors.
A powerful feature of the Lists module is its shared entity database. FastFund’s unique naming system allows you to set up one individual or company and identify them as multiple entity types. For example, a vendor who provides services to your nonprofit can also be tagged as a donor, allowing you to seamlessly cross-reference their invoicing activity with their donation history.
FastFund Raising organizes all of your development transactions using a unique gift pyramid. This structure automatically credits the appropriate accounts and allows you to measure the exact motivation behind each contribution.
The four levels of the gift pyramid are:
[INSERT SCREENSHOT: Show the triangular “gift pyramid” diagram illustrating how a Building Fund links down to Campaigns, Appeals, and Gifts.]
Recording financial activity is executed through easy-to-use Transaction entry screens that rigidly follow the double-entry principle of accounting, ensuring your books never fall out of balance. FastFund takes care of the proper recording of debits and credits for you.
To enforce strict accounting controls, FastFund prevents you from modifying a transaction if it is linked to other transactions, affects cleared bank transactions, or is dated within a closed accounting period.
The Utilities feature provides the tools necessary to maintain your financial data and keep tight fiscal controls on a monthly basis. Within Utilities, you can perform bank reconciliations, set up recurring transactions, merge duplicate constituent names, close the books, and perform global data updates.
To complete your back-office solution, FastFund generates informative, standard accounting-style reports that fully comply with FASB-116 and FASB-117 requirements. You can run statements of financial position, statements of activities, cash flow statements, and detailed donor giving summaries.
All reports feature customizable filters and can be easily printed or exported directly into Excel (XLSX), PDF, HTML, or comma-delimited (CSV) formats for external stakeholders.