How-To Guides

A comprehensive grant documentation checklist covering financial records, programmatic evidence, personnel files, and organization strategy — so you are audit-ready at any point in the grant period, not just at closeout.

How to build and maintain a grant reporting calendar that covers all deadlines, report types, responsible parties, and submission status across your entire grant portfolio — without missing a deadline.

Grant management software handles the post-award work — restricted fund tracking, expenditure documentation, reporting deadlines, and audit exports. This guide covers what it does, how it differs from accounting software and grant discovery tools, and what mid-sized nonprofits specifically need.

How grant management software, donor CRMs, accounting software, and grant discovery tools each serve different purposes — where each breaks down for grant-heavy nonprofits, and how to evaluate your current stack.

What nonprofit indirect cost rates are, how the 10% de minimis rate works, when to negotiate a NICRA, how foundations cap indirect recovery, and how to calculate your organization's actual indirect cost rate.

A practical guide to grant matching requirements — what counts as cash match versus in-kind contributions, how to value and document both, timing rules, and common match disallowances at audit.

How to know when spreadsheets have stopped working for grant compliance, what to inventory before migrating, how to clean your data, how long migration takes, and how to run parallel systems during transition.

A step-by-step guide to nonprofit net asset releases — what triggers a release, the journal entry, how it flows through the Statement of Activities, common timing errors, and what documentation you need.

How to build a nonprofit audit evidence binder (PBC binder) — the standard sections auditors expect, what to prepare before fieldwork begins, how to organize grant files for audit, and digital vs paper approaches.

Nonprofit audits come in two forms: financial statement audits and federal Single Audits under Uniform Guidance. This guide covers what triggers each, what auditors request, how to organize an evidence binder, and how far in advance to prepare.

An introduction to restricted fund accounting for nonprofits — the with-donor-restriction and without-donor-restriction net asset classes under ASU 2016-14, how to record restricted contributions, when to release restrictions, and common bookkeeping mistakes.

Restricted fund tracking is one of the most audit-prone areas in nonprofit finance. This guide covers FASB ASC 958 categories, what releasing a restriction means in practice, where tracking breaks down, and what a compliant system looks like.