Preparing Your Association for 2025: 5 Steps to Financial Resilience

As Canadian association leaders prepare for start 2025, many are asking the same question: “How can we spend less time managing finances and more time advancing our mission?” With increasing regulatory complexity, heightened member expectations, and tight budgets, financial management is more challenging than ever.
At Enkel, we’ve helped over 100 Canadian associations streamline their financial operations, ensuring compliance, improving reporting, and giving leaders the confidence and financial insights they need to tackle the future.
Here’s a practical roadmap to help you start 2025 on the right foot.
Great bookkeeping doesn’t have to be expensive!
Need better bookkeeping and financial operations support this year? Enkel has bookkeeping solutions for Canadian associations starting at $500/month.
Book a 15-minute call with our team to learn more.
1. Get Timely Financial Statements
Timely financial statements are the foundation of effective decision-making. Yet, many association leaders report delays, errors, and confusion around month-end and year-end reporting.
If your financial statements were always late this year, or they didn’t provide the insights your team needed to have on hand, here’s how to fix that for the year ahead.
Action Steps:
- Set a monthly schedule for receiving financial statements.
- Work with a professional bookkeeper or service provider to ensure accuracy and timeliness.
- Use QuickBooks Online Advanced to generate real-time financial insights.
When Fast & Female, a Canadian nonprofit, came to Enkel, we overhauled their financial processes. By outsourcing bookkeeping to a trusted partner, they eliminated reporting delays and gained financial clarity, enabling their team to focus on program delivery.
Set a similar goal for your member-based association. Regular, accurate reporting will help you enter every board meeting prepared and steer your association with confidence.
2. Minimize Year-End Accounting Admin
Year-end can be a chaotic time for associations, especially when dealing with audits, Notice-to-Reader statements, or reviews. The pressure to gather documentation, answer CPA queries, and reconcile accounts can be overwhelming.
One of the easiest ways to avoid getting bogged down in year-end admin is to offload the heavy lifting to a nonprofit bookkeeping service or financial operations service, so your team can stay focused on strategy and management.
Action Steps:
- Work with a bookkeeping service to handle audit preparation and CPA coordination.
- Create a shared checklist for year-end deliverables, so nothing falls through the cracks.
- Start preparing early—review your financials quarterly to catch errors before year-end.
For example, when BC Hepatitis outsourced all back-office functions to Enkel, we managed CPA interactions and audit samples, so BC Hepatitis staff could fully focus on their mission instead of paperwork.
3. Build a 2025 Budget—and Avoid This Common Mistake
Budgets should be more than a carryover from the previous year. A meaningful budget reflects your goals, accounts for seasonal fluctuations, and engages stakeholders in the planning process.
Avoid this Budgeting Mistake:
Don’t just roll the budget forward from last year. Simply dividing last year’s numbers by 12 often leads to inaccurate projections and mid-year shortfalls. It’s a common budgeting pitfall that most member-based associations make because they’re short on time or the team lacks strategic financial input.
At Enkel, we help associations develop the right budget template and we can facilitate the budgeting process. This budgeting exercise is an opportunity to engage stakeholders across the organization in advance and forecast 2025 will look like—before the new year is underway.
If you need some help creating a budget that you can measure against each month, get in touch.
Action Steps:
- Align your budget with your chart of accounts for clarity.
- Engage department heads to build their sections of the budget.
- Include a month-by-month breakdown to account for seasonal income and expenses.
- Reach out to your financial operations team or a fractional CFO for guidance as-needed
If you need some help creating a budget for the year ahead, ask a Fractional CFO or your CPA for strategic guidance.
4. Upgrade to Better Technology
Outdated systems slow you down and increase errors. Modern accounting tools can automate processes, improve accuracy, and provide real-time insights, saving both time and money.
Year-end is the best time to assess your current tech stack and switch to better tools and platforms. Do it in December, and you’ll be ready to start in January with a fresh slate—and better technology to run your association.
Action Steps:
- Evaluate Current Tools: Identify inefficiencies in your existing systems. What’s not working? Is there a better replacement solution you could use?
- Adopt Automation: Use tools like Dext for receipt management and Plooto for payments.
- Train Your Team: Ensure everyone understands the new tools to maximize adoption.
Modernizing your tech stack not only saves time but also provides the transparency your board demands.
If you’re unsure where to start, let Enkel modernize your accounting with the latest and greatest in accounting technology. We can help you identify opportunities for tech improvement, so your team can take advantage of automation opportunities, compliance, and document retention.
5. Get Started for Less
Financial management doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Many associations mistakenly believe that outsourcing is beyond their budget, but cost-effective options are available—and they can save your team from hours of monthly admin, headaches, and costly errors that wreak havoc during audits.
For example, Enkel offers bookkeeping services starting at just $500/month, making professional support accessible even for smaller associations.
The right bookkeeping partner can provide expert support at a fraction of the cost of in-house staff.
Action Steps:
- Find a bookkeeping service you can work with that suits your budget—they exist!
- Prioritize core tasks like reconciliations and reporting to maximize value.
- Consider outsourcing only high-impact areas like budgeting and compliance
- Schedule a financial health check to see where you can save.
Ready to get started? Book a free 15-minute Association Financial Health Check today and discover how much time and money you could save with Enkel.