Streamline your nonprofit's pipeline tracking spreadsheet with ease

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hey i'm greg boston i'm a cpa and i specialize in non-profit organizations around the country i also own quickbooks made easy for non-profits so basically i'm all about helping non-profits out and i wanted to talk to you for a second about grants now obviously you know it's important and helpful to get grants for your nonprofit organization and right now january february and march these are the biggest months for going grant shopping so if you haven't already done so i would encourage you to shop for grants and there's actually a place you can go to called grant station that's not me it's a separate entity but i really like them a lot i do a lot of teaching for them and you can sign up uh and look for grants through grant station it's a great place to go grant shopping but the main thing that i wanted to do because again i'm all about helping non-profits and i wanted to talk to you not so much about getting the grants but i wanted to talk to you about managing them and in particular tracking them and you know some grants are unrestricted so you can spend it however you want but many grants come with restrictions and i wanted to talk to you just for a second about what it means when a grant is restricted why it's important to track them what i mean by tracking them and then i'll give you a little bit of a tip about how to do it all right so uh first of all i'm gonna go into a little powerpoint slide here and i passed where i wanted to go there we go what is a restricted grant so a restricted grant is a grant that has some sort of strings attached now there's kind of two categories of strings one of them is called a use restriction this means that they're giving you the money but you have to spend it in some particular fashion or some particular way now this restriction could be very general like spend it on the education program or it could be very specific like spend it on the education program we will pay ten thousand dollars of that person's salary and we'll pay 40 of the rent it could be very very specific all right so those are called use restrictions because they're restricted in terms of how you can spend it now if you get a grant sometimes you'll get a grant and it'll say spend it for and then what it says is the mission of your organization you know you know spend it on helping children that's too general i'm talking has to be a little bit more specific spend it on this program or spend it for this particular purpose or spend it on these line items then it's use restricted okay now there is another restriction called a time restriction and some grants have both you send time some only have one or the other okay a time restriction means we're giving you this money but you can't spend it until next year or you are supposed to spend it between july 1 of 23 to june 30 or 24th something like that then it is time restricted so whether it's youth use restricted time restricted or both if it's restricted you need to track it now what do i mean by that i mean you need to track how you spent the money and why because many of these grantors are asking for reports in the interim in the middle or maybe at the end of how you spent those dollars now do you want to spend days trying to figure out how you spent the dollars after the fact i don't think so okay so instead what you want to do is you want to track things as you go now you may not be the accounting person so but whoever it is that's doing the accounting they really need to be pointing transactions to grants so i'm going to give you just a little bit of a hint in terms of how to track grants all right that are restricted just a couple of tips i guess one of them is do it in your accounting package don't do it in excel if it's in excel i don't know that those numbers are right hopefully your accounting package is right and so you want to do it there all right now i know you may not be the one dealing with your accounting package and it could be quickbooks it could be zero it could be myob it could be any number of accounting packages but regardless do it there okay now the way to do it is to set up each grant as a customer in your accounting package okay and again quickbooks has it xero has it most of them have a list where you put your customers they may be called donors or clients but there's a list where you put people that give you your money and put it there the other thing is if you get a grant from a funder every single year each grant is a separate name in that customer list all right and the reason why is because we have to track each grant separately now i'm just going to go into quickbooks real quick and show you that i've done this and you may not have quickbooks but it's pretty much the same in all pack software packages you'll see here i have this funder the rack foundation and i have two grants i have one for 2020-24 and i have one for 2024-25 so it's important that you track them separately and the and again the reason why is first of all when you enter transactions actually i'll just go over here you can pick which grant this particular expense is being paid out of okay because see sometimes the very last transaction in the 2324 grant was actually paid on the first day of 24.25 and so this way you can control that okay and the other benefit about this is if you are pointing expenses to grants and just put this up there point your expenses to grants as you enter them okay then you'll be able to get reports showing you how the dollars were spent here's a report that i got i got this out of quickbooks but it just gives me how much i got in and how much i spent this isn't the whole organization this is just money that was pointed to this particular grant so i can see that i've got looks like 24 000 left to spend now if you get a real crazy grant that has a budget and you have to like make sure that you don't overspend in certain line items a lot of federal grants are like this you can enter your budget in that other accounting package okay and then you'll be able to get a report that looks like this where you have the actuals and the budget for a grant so you can really see how you're doing so for the space rental here our budget was 15 and we've only spent 10 we have five left to spend okay so i think that's really really cool um so the other thing that uh i wanted to say and this is just a pet peeve of mine save your grants when you get the grant the signed grant a lot of times it'll be emailed to you these days please save it i like to save it in a folder called uh grants on my computer and then if your accounting package will allow you this one does actually quickbooks does i'll go ahead and edit this grant there's actually a place called attachments here you can literally attach the grant right in quickbooks okay there's an error uploading the file we'll try it one more time but the beautiful thing about this is when i come i'm an auditor uh if i come and audit your books then i will be able i don't know why it's giving me an issue here probably because i'm trying to record something uh but then i will be able to see your grant so you can attach it there obviously it did not work that's quite obnoxious but anyway the last thing uh i wanted to point out and this is the most important of all to be honest with you is that make sure that you set a calendar reminder for when reports are due okay so put it in your calendar give it to the bookkeeper give it to the executive director give it to the treasurer make sure that more than one person knows when reports are due the reason why i say this because i can't tell you how many times i've had clients where only one person knew when a report was due they left nobody else knew they missed a deadline and then they couldn't get funding the next year and you don't want that to happen so hopefully you found this helpful uh if you want any more information about me go to quickbooks made easy for nonprofits and catch you later