Daniel W. Elliot, CPA

  Year-end brings accounting factors not often considered during the year when interim reports are generated. If you are performing the following tasks on a monthly basis, you are probably not doing it with a 10% administration fee.   Let’s start with depreciation of capital assets and the    corresponding amortization of donation revenue where applicable. While this is often performed once at year-end, you could calculate these at the beginning of the year and allocate during the period using reoccurring entries. Remember, though, you will need to consider additions and disposals which occur during the year. Next, many of you have bi-weekly payroll which means the first pay after year-end will include days which belong to the prior year requiring an accrual in old year and a reversal in new. Some systems are able to do this monthly if the feature is available and used correctly. From there, we reevaluate leave balances by program such as sick and annual, and adjust ...

The joy of multiple programs is multiple funders each with their own reporting requirements including level of detail, frequency, templates, portals, and restrictions. As the Director of Finance for a mid sized not-for-profit, I had over thirty programs funded by over a dozen major sponsors to contend with, and sometimes even the same funder has different requirements for each of their programs. Unfortunately, there are situations where certain funders assume they are the only program we are running; probably because they themselves despite having multiple deliverers, are only running one program. The result of this can sometimes lead to angst and increases administration costs of program delivery.   Before we get into the details of funder reporting, let’s have a discussion on why we are reporting in the first place.   When you tender a requirement for a contracted good or service, regardless if you are a for profit business or not, you review the bids for value for money...