Nonprofit Financial Resource Center
Practical financial guidance for nonprofit leaders, boards, and finance teams.
Running a nonprofit means balancing two responsibilities at once: advancing the mission and stewarding the resources entrusted to your organization.
The financial side can get complicated quickly.
Audit requirements. Federal funding. Restricted contributions. Form 990. Board reporting. Internal controls. Cash flow. Grant compliance. Accounting systems. Forecasting.
The Nonprofit Financial Resource Center from Bilotta & Company, CPAs, LLC, brings those topics together in one place.
Whether you are preparing for your first audit, managing federal awards, strengthening financial reporting, or trying to give your board better visibility into the organization, these resources are designed to help you understand what matters, why it matters, and what to do next.
Browse Nonprofit Financial Resources
Audit & Assurance | Federal Funding & Single Audits | Accounting & Compliance | Internal Controls | Board Financial Oversight | Financial Leadership | Budgeting & Cash Flow
Audit & Assurance
Understand what level of financial reporting your organization needs and how to prepare for it.
Not every nonprofit needs an audit. But requirements can arise from state law, federal funding, grant agreements, lenders, governance documents, or stakeholder expectations.
These resources help nonprofit leaders understand the differences between audits, reviews, and other financial reporting requirements while preparing their organizations for a smoother assurance process.
When Does a Washington Nonprofit Need an Audit?
Washington charitable organizations can become subject to an independent audit requirement based on their average annual gross revenue. But revenue is only one possible trigger. Federal awards, contracts, funders, lenders, and governance requirements can also create an audit requirement.
Audit vs. Review: What Does a Nonprofit Need?
An audit and a financial statement review provide different levels of assurance and involve very different procedures.
Learn when an audit is required, when a review may be sufficient, and what nonprofit boards and leadership teams should consider when choosing the appropriate level of CPA assurance.
How Much Does a Nonprofit Audit Cost?
There is no universal nonprofit audit fee.
Organization size, accounting complexity, federal funding, grant activity, internal controls, audit readiness, transaction volume, and the quality of financial records can all affect the scope and cost of an engagement.
Learn what drives nonprofit audit pricing—and what organizations can do to improve audit readiness and efficiency.
How Long Does a First-Year Nonprofit Audit Take?
First-year audits often require more planning than recurring engagements because the auditor must understand the organization, its accounting practices, significant programs, funding sources, internal controls, and opening balances.
Learn what typically happens during planning, fieldwork, and reporting—and what can cause an audit timeline to expand.
How Should a Nonprofit Prepare for Its First Audit?
A smooth audit starts long before the PBC list arrives.
Reconciled accounts, organized grant documentation, support for restricted contributions, current policies, clean schedules, and clearly assigned responsibilities can make a significant difference.
What Should Be on a Nonprofit Audit PBC List?
A Prepared by Client, or PBC, list identifies the information an audit team needs from the organization.
Learn about common audit requests involving cash, contributions, grants, payroll, expenses, debt, fixed assets, board minutes, legal matters, internal controls, and financial reporting.
What Should a Nonprofit Look for When Choosing an Audit Firm?
Technical capability matters. So do communication, nonprofit experience, project management, capacity, staff continuity, timing, and an understanding of the organization's funding environment.
Learn the questions nonprofit leaders and audit committees should ask before selecting an audit firm.
Federal Funding & Single Audits
Navigate the additional financial responsibilities that come with federal awards.
Federal funding can provide significant resources for a nonprofit's mission—but it can also introduce additional accounting, compliance, documentation, and audit requirements.
Understanding those requirements before year-end can help organizations avoid surprises.
When Does a Nonprofit Need a Single Audit?
For fiscal years beginning on or after October 1, 2024, an organization that expends $1 million or more in federal awards during its fiscal year generally becomes subject to the federal Single Audit requirements under the Uniform Guidance.
The threshold is based on federal awards expended, not total organizational revenue.
What Is a Schedule of Expenditures of Federal Awards (SEFA)?
The SEFA is a critical component of the Single Audit process.
It summarizes federal awards expended during the fiscal year and provides important information used by auditors to determine which federal programs will be tested as major programs.
Learn what belongs on a SEFA, where the underlying information comes from, and why getting it right matters.
How Can a Nonprofit Stay Single-Audit Ready?
Single Audit readiness is a year-round responsibility.
Organizations receiving federal funding should understand award terms, identify federal assistance information, track expenditures accurately, maintain supporting documentation, monitor subrecipients when applicable, and understand the compliance requirements attached to their major programs.
Nonprofit Accounting & Compliance
Build financial records that support compliance, decision-making, and trust.
Accurate nonprofit accounting involves more than keeping the books balanced.
Organizations must often account for restrictions, grants, contributions, functional expenses, federal awards, noncash gifts, and other transactions that have nonprofit-specific financial reporting implications.
What Is Fund Accounting for Nonprofits?
Fund accounting helps organizations understand and communicate how resources are being used and whether donor, grantor, or legal restrictions are being honored.
Learn the principles behind nonprofit fund accounting and how they affect financial reporting.
How Should Nonprofits Track Restricted Funds?
Contributions and grants may carry donor-imposed restrictions that affect when and how revenue is reported and how resources should be tracked internally.
Learn how organizations can create stronger processes around restricted funding without building unnecessarily complicated accounting systems.
Who Should Prepare a Nonprofit's Form 990?
Form 990 is more than a tax filing.
It provides regulators, donors, funders, board members, journalists, and the public with information about an organization's finances, governance, activities, compensation, and operations.
Learn what nonprofits should consider when deciding who prepares and reviews their Form 990.
How Should Nonprofits Account for Gifts-in-Kind and Donated Services?
Noncash contributions can create unique accounting and disclosure requirements.
Understand when gifts-in-kind and donated services may need to be recognized in the financial statements and why documentation and valuation matter.
Internal Controls & Financial Stewardship
Protect resources without building bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake.
Strong internal controls help protect nonprofit resources, improve the reliability of financial information, support grant compliance, and give boards greater confidence in the organization's financial processes.
The goal is not to eliminate every possible risk.
It is to create thoughtful controls appropriate for the organization's size, people, systems, and resources.
What Internal Controls Should a Small Nonprofit Have?
Small nonprofits often face a particular challenge: limited staff can make traditional segregation of duties difficult.
That does not mean strong internal controls are impossible.
Learn how approvals, reconciliations, board oversight, system permissions, documentation, and compensating controls can help smaller organizations manage financial risk.
What Does Financial Stewardship Mean for a Nonprofit?
Financial stewardship goes beyond bookkeeping and compliance.
It means creating reliable information, protecting resources, planning ahead, communicating clearly with stakeholders, and making financial decisions in service of the organization's mission.
Board Financial Oversight
Give the board enough information to govern—not so much information that the signal gets buried.
Boards do not need to operate the accounting department.
They do need enough financial information to understand the organization's position, identify emerging risks, evaluate performance, and fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities.
What Should a Nonprofit Board Financial Dashboard Include?
A strong board dashboard turns financial information into a manageable set of indicators.
Depending on the organization, that may include operating results, liquidity, budget-to-actual performance, cash reserves, revenue concentration, restricted funding, grant performance, and other mission-relevant financial metrics.
What Financial Reports Should a Nonprofit Board Review?
Financial statements should help the board answer important questions:
Are we operating within our means?
Do we have sufficient liquidity?
Are results tracking with budget?
Where are financial risks developing?
Are resources being deployed according to plan?
Learn which financial reports can help boards oversee the organization without becoming involved in day-to-day accounting.
How Much Cash Reserve Should a Nonprofit Maintain?
There is no universal number of months of cash that works for every organization.
Appropriate reserves depend on revenue stability, funding concentration, reimbursement cycles, operating commitments, seasonality, risk, and access to other liquidity.
Financial Leadership & Outsourced Finance
Know when the organization has outgrown basic bookkeeping.
As nonprofits grow, financial complexity often grows faster than the accounting team.
More grants, employees, programs, restricted funding, reporting requirements, systems, and board expectations can eventually require financial leadership beyond transaction processing.
Bookkeeper vs. Controller vs. Fractional CFO for a Nonprofit
These roles solve different problems.
A bookkeeper primarily helps maintain transaction-level accounting. A controller typically owns the integrity of the accounting process and financial close. A CFO focuses more heavily on financial strategy, forecasting, risk, capital allocation, leadership, and decision support.
Many growing organizations ultimately need some combination of all three.
What Does a Nonprofit Fractional CFO Do?
A fractional CFO provides higher-level financial leadership without requiring the organization to hire a full-time CFO.
Responsibilities may include budgeting, forecasting, scenario planning, board reporting, cash-flow management, financial analysis, risk management, strategic planning, and collaboration with executive leadership.
When Should a Nonprofit Outsource Its Accounting Function?
Outsourcing can make sense when financial responsibilities have outgrown internal capacity, turnover creates continuity risk, leadership lacks timely information, or the organization needs expertise that would be difficult to hire individually.
The right question is often not simply whether to outsource.
It is:
Which responsibilities should the organization continue to own, and which would be stronger with outside support?
Budgeting, Forecasting & Cash Flow
Move from reporting what happened to understanding what happens next.
Historical financial statements matter.
But nonprofit leaders also need forward-looking information to make decisions around hiring, programs, grants, reserves, capital investments, and organizational growth.
What KPIs Should a Nonprofit Track?
The right KPIs should connect financial performance with organizational priorities.
Common measures include operating surplus or deficit, liquidity, budget variance, revenue concentration, fundraising efficiency, days cash on hand, grant performance, and other organization-specific measures.
How Should a Nonprofit Forecast Cash Flow?
Revenue does not always arrive when expenses occur.
Grant reimbursements, pledge collection, fundraising seasonality, restricted resources, payroll, program costs, and major expenditures can create significant timing differences.
Cash-flow forecasting helps leadership identify those gaps before they become emergencies.
Start With Your Organization
Every nonprofit has a different financial operating environment.
A small community organization, federally funded nonprofit, rapidly growing social-service provider, membership organization, and multimillion-dollar foundation may all need very different levels of accounting infrastructure, assurance, compliance, and financial leadership.
The right financial model should reflect:
organization size and complexity;
funding sources;
federal awards;
grant and contract requirements;
reporting obligations;
board expectations;
internal staff capacity;
accounting systems;
organizational risk; and
the decisions leadership needs to make.
The objective is not more finance for the sake of finance.
It is better Financial Stewardship in service of the mission.
Assess Your Nonprofit's Financial Stewardship
Not sure where your biggest financial risks or opportunities are?
The Nonprofit Navigator® Scorecard is a short diagnostic designed to help nonprofit leaders identify potential gaps around:
board reporting;
grant readiness;
compliance;
accounting processes; and
cash-flow visibility.
Take the Nonprofit Navigator® Scorecard →
Nonprofit Navigator® Financial Stewardship
Financial clarity that fuels your mission.
For organizations that need more than an annual audit, tax return, or occasional accounting assistance, Nonprofit Navigator® provides ongoing financial stewardship through Bilotta & Company's Financial Stewardship as a Service® model.
Depending on the organization's needs, that can include:
accounting and monthly close support;
balance-sheet reconciliations;
Form 990 and compliance coordination;
grant-readiness processes;
board reporting;
budgeting and forecasting;
controllership;
fractional CFO support; and
strategic financial planning.
The goal is straightforward:
Reliable financial information. Stronger systems. Better decisions. Fewer surprises.
About Bilotta & Company, CPAs
Bilotta & Company, CPAs, LLC is a CPA firm serving nonprofit organizations with assurance, tax, advisory, and ongoing financial stewardship services.
We help nonprofit executives, finance teams, and boards strengthen financial reporting, navigate compliance requirements, prepare for audits, modernize financial processes, and build the visibility needed to make informed decisions.
Our approach combines technical accounting and CPA services with forward-looking financial leadership—helping organizations remain accountable to their stakeholders while staying focused on the mission they exist to serve.
The information in this Resource Center is provided for general educational purposes and should not be considered legal, tax, or accounting advice for a specific organization. Requirements may vary based on an organization's facts, funding, contracts, regulatory status, and applicable laws and professional standards.