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.

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:

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.

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.

This week, Target announced that its 2013 data breach had been resolved for $18.5 million. That breach involved access to consumer data for over 110 million Target customers. Public service accountants should take notice. Whether you work with a school district, a fire department, police department, or any other public service entity, you will access and be responsible for sensitive data. Cougar Mountain Software’s DENALI allows you to breathe easy because its accounting solution solves common public service accounting security challenges with these five enhanced security features:

Have you ever noticed the eye roll when you ask for a split check at a restaurant? You’re having a great time with your friends and the wait staff is doing a great job, and when you ask to split the check the server’s demeanor instantly goes icy. It’s because split checks are a hassle. But split checks are part of doing business, any business. Beyond the restaurant world, third-party billing and split payments are a headache every accountant faces whether it’s between providers and insurers in the medical profession, or multiple donors in the nonprofit sector. Virtually every business will confront a third-party billing or split payment inquiry at some point. Denali and Denali Fund accounting software make it easy to answer those requests with an enthusiastic “YES!”

According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, nonprofits account for 5.3% of the GDP. That equals more than 1.5 million organizations accounting for 9.2% of all wages and salaries paid in the United States. That many organizations, all handling money on a daily basis, require a powerful accounting software solution. Denali FUND from Cougar Mountain Software is designed to handle the breadth of these organizations from the smallest to the largest, as well as the complexity of each organization’s individual finances.