What’s Really Holding Charity Finance Teams Back (And What Comes Next)

Ask any charity finance team what’s changed in the last few years, and the answer is rarely “we got more resources.”

Costs are rising. Funders and trustees want clearer answers, faster. And the finance team asked to deliver all of it is usually small – sometimes very small – relative to everything it’s expected to cover.

We sat down with Tom McEntee, Sales Consultant at Eureka Solutions, who works with charities of every size, from large organisations like Sequoia to smaller ones like the Christie Charity. He told us what’s actually slowing teams down, where the risk really sits, and what a modern, AI-ready finance function looks like once the basics are in place.

Here’s what he told us.

What’s actually putting charity finance teams under pressure?

According to Tom, the pressure isn’t really about any one task. It’s about volume and speed, from every direction at once.

“Finance teams and charities are being asked to do more with increasingly limited resources, whether that be people or financially,” he said. “Costs are ever rising across the board, and teams need much clearer visibility over how money is being spent – that’s coming from people within the organisation, from trustees, from funders.”

The common thread, no matter the size of the charity, is reporting. Getting the right information to the right stakeholder, quickly, while running day-to-day finance with a small team.

“People want it fast, they don’t want to be waiting around for information,” Tom explained. “It’s making their job more complex in terms of producing reports that give the information to every part of the organisation.”

Where does the manual work actually live? 

Almost every charity Tom works with relies on spreadsheets somewhere – and it’s rarely a choice made carelessly.

“It’s no fault of any charity. There will be a reliance on the likes of Excel spreadsheets, and manual processes, whether that’s reporting or approving certain transactions and purchases,” he said. “It’s the way it’s always been – that’s a common phrase we hear. And it works, to a certain extent.”

The area he sees it most is fund reporting – tracking restricted and unrestricted funds, grants and budgets, where knowing exactly where money’s being spent isn’t optional.

Disconnected systems compound the problem. Charities commonly run fundraising and donor platforms – JustGiving, Raiser’s Edge, Donorfy – entirely separately from their finance system.

“The transfer of data between the systems can be quite manual, using exports from spreadsheets,” Tom said. “That has a lot of duplicate effort involved with it – we’re putting in data twice, three times, sometimes four times. It’s then difficult to know what version of the data is correct and what’s maybe a little bit out of date.”

The knock-on effect isn’t just inefficiency. “The risk of errors always comes up as a key theme. If you’re doing something more than once, it really contributes to the risk of making a mistake,” he said. “And it takes away time from analysis – which is so important – analysing what the information actually means to the charity and how it affects their work.”

Where does the real risk sit?

Restricted and unrestricted funds, grants, and multiple income streams from events all add workload – but Tom points to something less obvious as the bigger risk: how much of that work depends on one person.

“You’re relying on one Excel spreadsheet, or a couple, and you’re also relying on one person’s knowledge and know-how of how to create these reports and manipulate them,” he said. “You’re having reliance on certain individuals or certain groups of individuals, which then becomes a risk in itself.”

How do you know you’ve outgrown your system?

Rarely is there a single red flag, Tom says. It’s a slow accumulation of workarounds.

“You are developing more workarounds just to simply keep up with routine daily tasks – creating another spreadsheet, adding another column, adding another formula because a requirement’s changed,” he said.

Other signs build gradually alongside it: month-end starts taking longer, reports stakeholders ask for become harder to produce, and straightforward questions from senior leaders or funders get harder to answer using the systems you’ve got.

“It’s trying to find the balance between getting ahead of the curve and stopping with the workarounds and sticky plasters,” Tom said. “Often it does take an event to really hit the finance team for that to sink in.”

What are modern charity finance teams doing differently?

The shift Tom sees across the charities he works with is a move away from manual dependency and toward connected, real-time systems.

“Modern finance teams are wanting to utilise technology more – connecting key systems, the finance system, fundraising platforms, donor management platforms – into one, to make that single source of truth,” he said. “Reporting in real time, as opposed to updating spreadsheets that might go out of date straight away.”

The goal, he says, is simple: spend less time producing information and more time interpreting it.

Connecting finance with fundraising, payroll, CRM, procurement and service delivery isn’t a nice-to-have, either – Tom is direct about this. “Finance doesn’t sit and operate in isolation,” he said. “Fundraising efforts can really affect income, the payroll effect that might have for volunteers, service delivery information can be essential when reporting to funders.”

The word he keeps coming back to is consistency. “If there’s consistency across the data set in terms of what’s coming from our systems, it gives a much clearer view of income, expenditure, funding,” he said. “Essentially, the reports you’re getting through the finance system are going to help elsewhere.”

Where can automation deliver quick wins?

Not every improvement requires a full transformation. Tom points to repetitive, rules-based tasks as the fastest place to see impact – starting with approvals.

“A main thing we speak to a lot of charities about is control and spend – whether it’s events or fundraising activities,” he said. “A lot of the time there has to be approvals in place before money is spent, but that can be quite manual. It involves emails, sometimes paper, picking up the phone.”

He points to North West Air Ambulance as an example: “Approvals was really at the forefront of what they wanted to drive efficiency from a new system.”

Bank reconciliations and recurring journals are similarly ripe for automation. “It amazes me sometimes at the time it takes for charities to do these tasks, just with the way they operate,” Tom said. “It’s just been the way it started, and it’s kind of evolved.”

Once the foundations are in place, where does AI actually add value?

Tom is clear that AI’s real value in charity finance isn’t about replacing analysis – it’s about accelerating it, once the data underneath is trustworthy.

“AI can help in terms of reviewing information quickly. What I find AI is really good for is putting context onto information – getting insight into what is driving the numbers,” he said. “It’s helping with that second phase of the analytics, which is probably the most important part – analysing the findings and making decisions off the back of that.”

That includes forecasting, data quality checks, and the ability to ask questions of your own data in plain language. “We can ask questions in our language and get answers back,” he said. “It’s not there to give the full answer, but it should help finance teams on the way to making better decisions.”

Security and trust remain central to the conversation. “That’s always the question that comes with AI – how secure is it, and can we trust what it’s given us?” Tom said. “A lot of systems nowadays are really focused on that.”

What does a modern, AI-ready framework actually need?

Asked to sketch out the essential foundations for a charity finance team preparing for AI, Tom names five pillars: people, processes, systems, data and governance.

“People need the right skills in terms of using AI, but also being more publicly educated in it,” he said. On process and governance, he’s equally direct: “There has to be a kind of process and governance – doing it in the right way, doing it securely, keeping privacy in mind.”

Systems matter for the same reason. “Having AI built within the actual finance system itself, you have more of a guarantee over security, as opposed to using a third-party free tool,” he said.

And underpinning all of it is data. “The data has to be correct and accurate before AI can help with contextualisation. The AI output is based on the data that is driven from the system.

What should charity finance teams prioritise now?

Looking ahead, Tom expects finance teams to spend progressively less time on manual data entry and checking, and more time on analysis and decision-making – but only for teams that do the groundwork first.

“It all starts by understanding the current process – identifying where all the data lives and addressing what the biggest gaps and challenges are,” he said. “You can’t use these tools until you really understand what you’re looking to achieve.”

His closing point is one worth sitting with: “The goal is not to adopt AI and automation for its own sake, and it’s not there to replace humans. It’s there to support the finance team and build a function that’s more efficient – and ultimately helps the charity with its mission.”

If your team recognises some of what Tom describes – spreadsheets holding everything together, data spread across disconnected systems, or reports that take longer than they should – the fix starts with understanding where your foundations stand today, not with picking a tool.

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