Optimize Your Cash Flow with a Weekly Billing Format for NPOs

Weekly billing format for NPOs

when I'm doing research on nonprofits there are seven key questions that need to be asked three of them are answered on the first page first is is who is the organization there's an address label there's a phone number and there's also website in the description just to make sure that you're looking at the right organization so you know who it is that you're talking with the second one we're going to ask is is how big are they and there's a couple of good ways to do that my favorite is to look at individuals employed and also volunteers that gives us a sense of size you can compare them to different organizations in the same way you can look at the revenue numbers expenses and fund balances to get a sense of scale and then the third question is are they financially healthy and so we're going to look left to right you know identifying where there's growth trending in the right direction and it's a quick check I encourage you to download last three years you can see trends what you're also seeing is that on every line there's a reference and the the parts are nearly the same as pages they'll least help you get to the right part of the document so my fourth question then is so what do they really do and this page provides some some good insights it also references schedule o which is a form we'll see later in the document these two questions are important if you see yes answers there'll be a additional information and schedule Oh about significant changes to their programs or what's been happening if if you if you don't that's what you're supposed to see so this is true kind of throughout the form as you're looking you're hoping for you knows but if you see yes is that it's something that you need to investigate further they provide a detailed description of their programs along with associated expenses and potentially revenue if in fact there is some the next few pages continue with this checklist approach this is showing additional required schedules that are needed and a good example of that is if you look down here on question 17 and 18 dealing with do they have 15,000 and fundraising expenses or 15,000 in income associated with a fundraising event so in this case they had an event but no fundraiser and what this would be doing is referring them to a different line item and section and what this is doing is helping to start the answer to the fifth question that I have which is how do they raise money so we know there are events in this case but not fundraisers we can also look to section 5 on page 5 to be looking at the other IRS tax compliance kinds of documents so this is important because it makes it really hard to hide information since there's so much cross-referencing going on 31 related again to the number of employees and it shows that yes they did have withholdings for them if we look to page 6 this is dealing with governance questions and examples are you know are you aware of a significant diversion of the organization's assets you know that's the kind of answer you really don't want to have to say yes to whereas in the B section it flips and what we're doing here is you really do want to say yes because this is about do you have a whistleblower policy and our retention destruction you know policy do you have do you have policies related to the way you do operations very important and helpful for organizations to think about which which gets us then to to page 2 a section 7 on on page 7 and this is answering the question are they professionally managed good information you can read here that talks about it then they for each director the question is whether or not they have compensation on the second page we're talking about directors they have a single employee the executive director working 40 hours a week making 100 thousand and if you go to the bottom of this section what you're finding is is that they do just have one employee making more than a hundred thousand bees checkboxes are worth watching for because they deal with former employees with highly compensated employees and with employees or where there are career there's a crude compensation where do you owe somebody some money for something you've been doing and it's important that that that be disclosed in the same way independent contractors that made more than a hundred thousand dollars for the year also need to be disclosed because what that's doing is showing people who were nearly employees or or other services that were provided that we're worth documenting part eight on page nine is the statement of revenue and this is about kind of helpful categorizations it shows you a bit about how the organization shows their revenue streams for this organization they have government grants that we're interesting they also have additional services revenue in addition to their grants and all this becomes totaled but it again gives you a sense of comparison as to what they consider to be important when we look at the the functional expenses this answer is the seventh question for me which is about how do they spend their money and each line item is is further segmented by you know programs by overhead and fundraising so it's definitely worth the review you'll see this is the same number that came from form the part 7 additional employee information and fees for for non employees again related in some of those contractor work that we saw above and then this other line item here other expenses on line 24 shows you just what they think is is worth categorizing so so definitely relevant as well and then if we look at the the balance sheet we're we're actually going back to question three which is about are they healthy and so this is kind of revisit of that shows a little more detail and what it also shows in a nonprofit organization there's something here called permanently restricted assets you can think of that as being endowments so the idea is is if somebody started the year without much or increased substantially then what that would mean is is that additional revenue was was recognized during the year but unfortunately it's not money available for them to spend so it's in it could be relevant when you're doing risk assessments because you again you're assuming that they have revenue that they didn't actually capture if we look to page twelve this is more of a summary page I do think there are some of the additional statements that that are helpful if we go to an actually page on page 13 is a Schedule A the next page for the for page 14 of that which is really the part 2 of the Schedule A what this is doing is is actually going back to our question 5 which is which is how do they raise funds and this is kind of a part two of that as well because we're looking at a five year trend oldest - most recent years showing how their how their money has come in and then if we actually look out there's an additional schedule so it's worth kind of working through their schedules to see what all they're showing they do show a contributors which is helpful because this does show you know there are some municipalities that we're making contributions how does that show up it's probably worth some questions to understand that as well and then we had also talked about the the idea that there's a schedule oh it's always worth going out to see what additional information is going to show up here would also comment on the date because initially the returns are due five months after the year end but you can file for a 90-day extension you can actually do that twice turns out there's more extensions out there than actually filings made just because it's such a common occurrence but that just means it adds an additional six months or nearly a year just to file so if your year-end is june you'll be using the the prior year form and extensions and then GuideStar uses an outside service to digitize the the pdfs and that's going to take a couple of more months from the time to the IRS even makes it available which is again a couple months delay so you know you could be looking at ish '''l five months so the form could easily be two calendar years old so know that if you need current information you can certainly get it talking to the organization directly because they are legally required to it to share the when requested but let us know if you have questions and we'll do our best to cover them in future videos Thanks