Financial Advisory

We partner with organizations to optimize financial performance and to keep the file defensible. Those are the same project. A close that produces numbers nobody can trace is a reporting problem this year and an audit finding next year.

The practice concentrates where money carries conditions: federal awards, tax-exempt status, restricted funds, and the reporting that funders and boards rely on. For the audience view of the same work, see Nonprofits & Faith-Based Organizations.

01Federal financial management

Organizations that receive federal money take on obligations that go well beyond spending it: how costs are justified, how procurement is documented, how staff time is supported, how subrecipients are monitored, and how the resulting schedules reconcile to the audited financials. We build the systems that produce that record as the work happens, rather than reconstructing it afterward.

The audit is where all of it is graded. We prepare before the auditor arrives — reconciling the schedules, testing the controls, and closing the gaps while there is still time to close them.

When a prior-year finding is already on the letter, we work backward from it: what was required, what the file shows, and what has to be true before the next cycle.

02Cost allocation and recovery

Organizations that receive federal funds routinely under-recover the indirect costs they are entitled to, because the allocation methodology was never built properly or has not been revisited since the organization changed shape.

We develop cost-allocation plans, build and negotiate indirect-cost-rate proposals with the cognizant agency, and document the methodology so it holds up in a single audit. For most organizations this is not a compliance exercise. It is money.

03Fund accounting and reporting

Restricted and unrestricted net assets, donor-restriction tracking, board-designated funds, and financial statements a board can read and a funder will accept. The work is the chart of accounts and the close — not a slogan about fund accounting.

Reporting has to serve three readers at once: the board that approves, the funder that verifies, and the auditor that tests. We build one set of records that answers all three rather than three reconciliations that disagree quietly.

04Nonprofit financial strategy

Funding mix, reserve policy, and whether the next program can be absorbed without breaking the control environment. Growth is where most nonprofit finance problems begin: a grant arrives, or a campaign succeeds, and the infrastructure that worked at the old size stops working at the new one.

The annual information return belongs in this conversation, not at the end of it. It is a public document, and often the first thing a funder, a journalist, or a state regulator reads. We help organizations file a return that matches the books, the schedules, and the story the board thinks it is telling.

05Financial planning and analysis

Budgets that a board can hold management to, forecasts that state their assumptions, and variance reporting that names a cause rather than a number. For grant-funded organizations, the budget has to survive contact with award conditions — a budget that ignores allowability is a plan to create questioned costs.

06Performance improvement

Close cycle, reconciliation discipline, approval workflow, and the segregation-of-duties question that small finance offices cannot answer the textbook way. We design compensating controls — dual review, documented authorization limits, a bank reconciliation signed by someone other than the preparer — and we test them.

Where a control fails, we say whether the failure is design or operation, and what it costs to fix. We do not bury a fail in a management comment.