Thinc insights
For nonprofits in Ontario and wider Canada, the growing value of their services has come with the pressure to do more with less.
Ontario’s nonprofits are needed more so than ever. Despite a growing Canadian economy, many communities across the region still face widespread anxiety and uncertainty. It’s the same across Canada, where the 85,000+ registered charities across the country have been on the frontlines for the past half decade, providing support to communities during and after the pandemic.
The services that nonprofits deliver are also in themselves a driver of economic health, creating jobs and a happier society. The current conditions are far from optimal, however. Ontario’s nonprofits are operating with leaner funding, which can impact on their mission. The ONN, which represents the 58,000 nonprofit and charity organizations in the region, has found that programs are being scaled back and waiting lists are at an all-time high.
As a result, more and more nonprofits are thinking digitally, adopting purpose-built systems to help them build their resilience and flexibility.
In this blog, we’ll explore the challenges that the sector is facing, before unpacking how Sage Intacct is being adopted to support the nonprofit sector in delivering their essential value to society.
While campaigners on behalf of the sector try and gain support from Ontario’s government, nonprofits will themselves be seeking ways to navigate the pressures on the ground. Here are the top challenges that are impacting the sector in 2025.
As dependency on them increases, so must the output of nonprofits in the region. Budgets have been impacted, with ONN’s report finding that 54% of nonprofits are experiencing declining or stagnant revenues and 84% report increases in expense to deliver their mission. Inflation has led to increased operational costs, while funding sources haven’t grown at the same rate.
Nonprofits have had to work with fewer donations, stripping back where they can. What’s more, there are widespread staffing shortages, with 90% of charities across Canada having ten or fewer staff members. Nonprofits are having to adjust to doing more with less.
Since the pandemic and recent world events, there has been a sense of ‘donor fatigue’, where donors feel overwhelmed by frequent requests on the back of global crises and economic instability.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to retain long-term donors, too, as charities with limited resource struggle to convey their return on mission. With inflation, donors are dialling back on household spend, leading to reduced charitable donations and in overall funding that a nonprofit has to work with.
What’s more, the competition to access already limited funding is only growing, as the thousands of nonprofits across Ontario are vying for the same pot. It is becoming more and more difficult for nonprofits to win funds, placing a high importance on the demonstration of return on mission to secure funding.
Donors are also increasingly demanding to see exactly how their money is making a difference; if a nonprofit can’t demonstrate this, through financial efficiency or mission success stories, it’ll lead to the donor going elsewhere.
Fragmented systems, specifically on the finance side of activity, only heighten the issues that come with the three challenges above. Limited resource, working on fragmented systems, only saps resource further – duplication of effort, manual data entry, risk of human error – these are all issues that occur with fragmented systems.
There’s also a lack of real-time financial visibility, with new data not being tracked, or old data being reflected in reports (thus impacting accuracy of reporting). This has a critical impact when nonprofits are trying to produce statements to secure funds. It also becomes more difficult to track donations, which impacts budgets and can also lead to compliance risks.
Despite these challenges, there is room to be optimistic. The Canadian economy is back to steady growth, meaning that donor behaviour will start to change for the better. Conversations are beginning with local governments around more support for the stabilisation of the nonprofit sector, where an Office and Associate Minister represents nonprofits and charities, separate from the ONN.
In the meantime, however, nonprofits must get more efficient, doing more with less. One of the core ways you can do this is with the financial management capabilities of Sage Intacct.
Tools like Sage Intacct offer nonprofits in Canada the opportunity to improve efficiency, enhance financial oversight, and focus more resources on their proposed missions. Let’s apply Sage Intacct to each challenge.
Sage Intacct enables nonprofits and charities to automate key processes, which frees up staff to focus on mission-critical tasks; slashing time taken to consolidate funding figures or pull together more in-depth reports.
It can help with identifying cost-saving opportunities through real-time expense tracking, so resource can be better utilized elsewhere.
From a revenue resource perspective, Sage Intacct helps nonprofits track revenues by program, location or funding source. This supports with accurate allocation of funds for each program, so everything is tracked properly and with greater visibility.
All of this helps you be prepared for any economic uncertainty that could be around the corner. Nonprofits will have to be as agile and resilient as ever, but Sage Intacct can help to support resource with planning ahead, given its strong financial forecasting capabilities.
With its robust financial capabilities, including customizable dashboards and automated reports, nonprofits and charities can report on grant performance and return on mission with much greater ease and accuracy.
This can help with demonstrating success to stakeholders, but also to outside donors, who will see the value in donating through visibility of a successful mission.
To support with donation and re-donation campaigns, Sage Intacct integrates with donor management systems, which enables the ability to analyse donor behaviour. With this, your donor base can be segmented, enabling you to tailor campaigns more, and engage donors with personalized communications.
Given the competition for securing funding, achieving that buy-in is increasingly more complicated, so complete transparency of return on mission plans is expected. There can be barely any room for error, and outside funders expect to see granularity.
Sage Intacct’s real-time data can support nonprofits with building cases for securing these funds, displaying what the impact of their contributions would be.
Seeing exactly how their money is making a difference is what’s going to secure donations and building success stories to support this claim is also made easier with the granularity, accuracy and ease-of-use that comes with Sage Intacct.
Sage Intacct can completely replace multiple fragmented systems. It offers a unified, cloud-based financial management system, where data is centralized in one place.
It allows its users to have complete confidence in their reporting and planning, given its real-time insights and easy to build dashboards, so nonprofits can make their resource go further and make better informed decisions quicker.
With Sage Intacct as a core financial platform, nonprofits can also easily track and report on funds and donor activity, helping you to provide required mission-related information to a donor upon their request.
Sage Intacct is also scale-friendly, so should you expand across provinces, it’s a solution that can scale with your growth.
By consolidating systems with a robust solution like Sage Intacct, Ontarian nonprofits and charities can reduce inefficiency and maximize resource output during a time where budgets and workload are stretched beyond capacity.
Nonprofits can focus on their missions with confidence, drawing upon accurate real-time data to support with budgeting for now and planning for the future. Grant reporting and donor management are made much easier with purpose-built features within Sage Intacct, making it that bit easier to secure future donations.
Should you wish to learn more about how we can help nonprofits in Ontario and beyond with Sage Intacct deployment and support, get in touch today.
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