A challenge for any business or nonprofit organization is the ability to analyze data from multiple sources and transform it into meaningful information. Business Intelligence (BI), analyzes the data for you and creates reports, graphs, charts, and other visual aids to give you further insight into your organization’s performance. A step up from simple dashboards of years past, BI software offers drill down options, forecasting, trends, and alerts that truly help you plan for the future.

Cougar Mountain Software is excited to offer this technology to our customers with our new product, Denali BI powered by Sisense. Below we will talk about three key features of Denali Business Intelligence.

At Cougar Mountain Software, we are very excited to be a new addition to the NeonCRM family. With Denali FUND and NeonCRM’s donor management program, you not only get true fund accounting software for your organization, but you also get all the benefits of NeonCRM’s complete donor management solution.

NeonCRM gives you a variety of features that integrate with Denali FUND such as:

• Importing recurring, anonymous, and memorial donations directly into General Ledger
• Tracking grant applications
• Managing donor relationships, running campaigns, and tracking volunteers
• Accessing NeonCRM through any device with internet access
• Collecting donor information and payments through web-based forms

Every organization needs accounting. But what about a government agency, what kind of accounting does it require? According to AccountingEdu.org, “The goals of federal, state or municipal government agencies when applying the principals of accounting are different from the private sector’s main business objective of earning profit…government agencies and other recipients of government money are fiscally accountable to tax payers and must demonstrate compliance with the intended uses of…resources.”

We compiled this list of Top 5 Software Features for Government Accounting to help you determine what is most important for your agency.

Fund Accounting

Fund accounting is a method of accounting that allows you to keep the programs within your organization separated by fund numbers. Each fund, labeled as restricted, temporarily restricted, or unrestricted, contains its own chart of accounts. The biggest difference between fund accounting and regular accounting is fund accounting emphasizes accountability rather than profitability.

Let’s dig a little more into how fund accounting works.

Do you see that? The big plume of smoke rising from the bottom of the canyon, up, up, up. All the way up to our vantage point where it drifts past the jagged boards where the bridge ends. See it curl around the signs painted in red, “DANGER – BRIDGE OUT AHEAD”?

We’d like to prevent your business from being the cause of that plume of smoke because your decades-old accounting software crashed and burned through all the warning signs.

THE PROBLEM

CMS Pro is no longer supported by Cougar Mountain Software.

Progress doesn’t stand still. The fact that the product we introduced over 20 years ago still functions and contributes to so many successful organizations gives us no small amount of satisfaction. But when it’s compared to contemporary industry standards for capability and convenience, CMS Pro is just a fast horse racing against ever-more innovative vehicles.

As of September 1, 2017, CMS Pro reached its end of life. This is a normal and expected phase of any software’s existence. The best parts of the program were carried over into the next generation, contributing to a never-ending cycle of improvement.

Spring of 2017 brought with it a sterling opportunity to enact one of Cougar Mountain Software’s core values: to be “Accountable to our Communities.” Robert Geier and Dave Parvin, two of the company’s best programmers, offered their time and extensive knowledge to assist aspiring developers on the 4th and 5th of April 2017. In conjunction with Boise CodeWorks, Southern Idaho’s premiere coding bootcamp, Geier and Parvin conducted mock interviews for trainees in the final week of their Boise CodeWorks training. The programming-language school covers HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Twitter, Google, .NET, SQL, and Git. The mock interviews covered all of that, as well as workplace etiquette, resume construction, and the difficult art of self-promotion. The half hour interviews occurred between the hours of 1 and 4 pm and were hosted on-site at the CodeWorks facility.

Proving the old adage that goodness breeds goodness, the benefits of this exercise were two-fold. Students were questioned, advised, and in some cases championed by Cougar Mountain Software’s veteran programmers, bolstering these new computer linguists, web developers, and analysts entering the local job market. This, in turn, will elevate the performance of the entire area and hopefully foster innovation. The second benefit impacts Cougar Mountain Software clients more directly, in that for each student, mock interview, curriculum question, and out-of-the-box answer that Geier and Parvin were exposed to, their own knowledge was stretched. Their enhanced perspective was taken back to the Cougar Mountain Software Dev department and applied to how their teams think about or will execute future projects. If you ask them, they’ll confess that they only teamed up with Boise CodeWorks to help. Plain and simple. Especially for a profession that is often associated with loners and dark cubicles, Geier and Parvin recognized this as an opportunity to use their experience to engage with the future talent in their field and help the local community.