I was asked recently how to create an operations manual. The first thing you need to decide is what will be in it. Will it cover everything or will you have a separate personnel and financial policy / accounting manual? If you are doing an all-in-one you can always break it into pieces later, you don’t want to have something so unwieldy that it is never looked at.
A great way to start is to create a list of different activities that happen in your nonprofit every week:
- How is the mail opened?
- When are deposits made?
- How is payroll done?
- Who is making sure our reports are filed?
- Who approves the bills to be paid?
After five minutes of brainstorming you and your colleagues can have the beginnings of a manual. It does not have to be fancy, even a simple bulleted list will do the job.
The complexity and size of your organization will be a guide as your are putting the manual(s) together. There are some things that larger organizations will want to have that smaller groups may not yet need. But there are some standard items that all nonprofits will want to include.
Resources for putting your operations manual together
There are some great resources out there for creating your manuals. For a great Operations Toolkit please look at the one here, Heather has put together a nice piece.
CompassPoint’s Nonprofit Genie has this piece on creating an accounting manual. The focus of the article is on internal controls, of which good policies and procedures figure prominently.
The National Council of Nonprofit’s resource pages have a number of excellent templates and guides for policy manuals, including those asked for on the new 990.
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