When Tim Worstall, Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and Forbes contributor, called Microsoft Excel “the most dangerous software on the planet,” he had a good reason.

Nonprofit organizations have unique challenges they have to face in today’s world. Everything from donor retention to keeping track of all the funds coming and going from your organization can be tricky. As a leader in your nonprofit, you are often the one to face these challenges and are responsible for successfully overcoming them.

Here are three common challenges nonprofit leaders face today.

Your nonprofit organization adds some good to this world. You, your employees, your volunteers, and those your organization serves, all know how much good your organization does. They know where your revenue goes and they trust you will continue to use it wisely. But what about potential donors, grantors, and certain governing bodies? How do you present your organization’s financial information to them?

Your nonprofit organization means everything to you. The work you do matters and as a leader of your nonprofit, it’s your fiduciary responsibility to make a choice that will keep your nonprofit out of the hands of fraud. But you can only continue your work if you have money to support it. How do you manage the money your nonprofit receives, but still keep it safe from embezzlement?

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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.

Under a hard close (also known as a fast close), organizations audit and “close the books” after a set period of time. For most organizations, the time period coincides with the end of a month, quarter, and year. The term “hard close” is meant to describe the situation in which all of the transactions for the period (based on the transaction date) have been processed and there is no more financial activity allowed for that period.

The “hard close” process may have a number of steps and specific actions that vary depending on the business or organization, but the accounting team generally reviews the figures and checks all of the organization’s financial records for the time period. These can include revenue and expense accruals, overhead allocations, and updating reserve accounts.