Name: Audit-Ready Before Filing Season: Form 990 Prep for Nonprofit Finance Teams
Uploaded: 2026-09-23T18:30:49.403Z
Duration: 57 min 36 s
Description: Audit-Ready Before Filing Season: Form 990 Prep for Nonprofit Finance Teams

Transcript for "Audit-Ready Before Filing Season: Form 990 Prep for Nonprofit Finance Teams": Good afternoon, everybody, or morning for others that are joining us in a different time zone. My name is Blake Rudolph. I will do a more proper introduction here in a few minutes with our friend John at GRF. Excited to, chat through audit readiness, and the not for profit sector. So as we kick this off, for those that are, in already, and you can see the chat feature, and the q and a feature. Please go ahead and leverage those throughout the conversation today. The chat feature, feel free to drop comments in there or anything like that. The q and a, for questions, we'll have a little segment at the end for q and a with myself and John. So feel free to put any questions you have in that q and a side, and we will either, answer them during the discussion and or towards the end of the discussion. Few housekeeping items for us. We just posted in the chat. Our our friend Genevieve did there, but Google Chrome is the best. We will send the recording to you all tomorrow once, once everybody's done. So excited to kick things off here. For those that are using the, chat in here, feel free to pop in. Where are you located? In the country world, US, Canada, etcetera? We'd love to know where you are calling in from. So, I'm personally from, the state of North Dakota. So I live outside. I saw someone say Bismarck, North Dakota, which is phenomenal. I am between Dickinson and Medora, North Dakota out there. But, excited to to meet with you. John is in the DC area. And, John, I'm gonna hand it over to you to do a quick introduction, and then I will do an introduction on my side. Awesome. Thank you. Well, thanks, Blake. It's great to be here, this afternoon. Thank you to everybody for showing up. My name is John Pace. I am a partner with GRF CPAs and Advisors. We're located in Bethesda, Maryland, which is right outside of Washington, DC. And I've been with the firm twenty two years, and I run our outsourced accounting and advisory services group. And our group focuses primarily on not for profits and government contractors. So perfect, subject for us to discuss today. Love that. Thanks, John. And my name is Blake Rudolph. I lead our enterprise accounting partnerships team here at Ramp. Been here about between three and a half and four years now and excited to dive into the not for profit sector. So let's kick it off. Why don't we? Right. We're gonna talk a little bit there's a there's a handful of slides in here, and this is gonna be very fireside chat, as well. So, again, for those of you that do have questions, please feel free to drop them in the q and a, and we're happy to to dive into those, like I said, either during the call, if they're appropriate with the content we're going through or at the end of the call as well. So, I'll kick us off, John. First question I have for you is with, with not for profit clients. When you have an NFP NFP is not for profit, by the way. So I'll use the NFP language every once in a while for those that don't know that acronym. When you have a client, what do you wish they would have asked you earlier in the process? Yeah. That's a great question. You know, I think we have clients of all different sizes, but I think, you know, questions that we would love to see earlier, big ones are, you know, redoing rereviewing general ledger coding, cost allocations, things like that. You know, if you're doing those again I mean, it's good it's always good to review before your audit, obviously. But if we're talking about kind of last minute and very late in the game, going back and trying to reclassify, especially for grant funded non for profits and moving time and moving projects around, you know, that's one of those things we really wish we could have started that earlier and, you know, wonder why we're doing it at this late hour. Totally fair there. And. kinda leads really into the the month end close process as well, Yeah. and kinda continuing on that that realm. We see clients scramble a lot. Right? They're they're trying to get, all kinds of documentation and everything figured out for compliance reasons. What does the scramble actually cost the client, whether it's fees, staff time, etcetera? Yeah. It's a great question. And, you know, maybe before I answer it, I I mean, I think this slide is a really good example of our particular philosophy as well. So, like, starting with during the year. Right? And and one of our basic philosophies at GRF is really to avoid the scramble, avoid the fire drills. And, you know, one of the big ways you actually do that is by you know, you see the left side of the slide here. You know, we shoot for a full GAAP close, full accrual basis close, not ignoring the balance sheet. You know? And so you can see that here, like, monthly closes on a consistent schedule. All those balance sheet schedules roll because I always say, you know, a lot of the mystery and a lot of that stuff hides on the balance sheet. Right? And so, you know, and if you don't do that at your end, the scramble can be very costly. It can be costly in this in in the sense of potentially delaying your audit. And most firms these days, if you're actually not ready for your audit, there are typically now provisions in your engagement letter that will charge premiums. So they don't get, the the PVCs and the work papers by a certain date before field work, you know, there's a premium. And the same thing goes with nine nineties. And so it it really pays to be proactive. So there's a there's a money cost in terms of what you will pay as an organization. There's just the overall stress on you and your finance team. And, and so that's one of the things we really try to try to help our clients with is, you know, we want to de stress this for you and make it really mostly a nonissue because we've got your back or your finance team has your back all throughout the year. So stress, actual dollars, and, you know and and then, of course, audit findings and mistakes. Right? If you're scrambling, that's when people are gonna be under pressure and potentially make mistakes. Totally. And I think it's important to call out too, John. When we're working with these wonderful not for profit clients that really have a mission to give back to whatever their mission is. Right? It's also important to to kind of step back and understand as well, that these particular missions that they're serving and they're going to market with, that's their focus. Mhmm. The. the back office, the finance side of it doesn't necessarily come up as a first priority, at the, at the top of the hour, if you will. It it's really given back to the mission. And so, making sure that you are working with a partner and or, if you have an internal staff or internal staff that you are working with that you guys are doing due diligence so that you don't have to worry about this and you can really focus on that mission that you're you're trying to serve the community and the the areas that you serve. Yeah. And I I. think to your point too, one of the things that we often say is nonprofits face, challenges that are disproportionate to their size. And, you know, there's a lot of compliance with nonprofits because the majority of you are dealing with public money one in one way or the other. And so there's there's additional oversight, that, you know, Main Street business is just not gonna have. And so those challenges, even they echo exactly what you're talking about, Blake. Totally. Absolutely. And just kind of a a tack on to this question because to to your point, I love this slide. I'm I'm kind of looking at what you can do during the year and what happens towards the end of the year as well. What's the mistake or mistakes that you typically see, in this process where people actually don't realize it is a mistake that they have to stay in the lines. Yeah. I mean, there's probably a lot of them, to be honest, but I think there's a couple of key mistakes. I mean, conceptually is underestimating the audit, you know, and, and really not valuing your finance structure. You know, and those so those are those are some philosophical issues. But in terms of you know, for most of our clients, I think, in in the nonprofits that we work with, they understand a lot. But right there, bullet, three, grant and restrictions, you know, those those those are definitely some gotcha zones for not for profits. And if you're not paying particular attention to them and you should you know, we do it monthly. As as grants come in, you know, we review all of those. That I think is a best practice. So if you can and your finance team has the capacity, that's what you should do because at the end of the if you wait to the end, then there there can be some significant, changes as a result because the not for profit revenue recognition rules are not the easiest thing in the world to understand. Absolutely. This is a ad. hoc question, by the way, John. Yeah. Sure. I'm curious from your standpoint, is it always accrual, or do you see some cash basis too? Oh, that's a great question. You know, because almost because we deal mostly with not for profits, all but the littlest ones that are just started up or whatever, those guys are almost always audited. It it depends. Right? You know, a c three, you know, you're starting with c three, you're very likely to be audited pretty quickly. C fours and c sixes, probably nice. Different slightly different thresholds and things like that. So, I would say it is 98% accrual for us. Perfect. And I will have Jackie just put in the chat, they're audited on a modified cash basis. So that's super interesting and. and love to see the the differences and the nuances there as well. And, just say, again, we if you do have any questions, feel free to put them in the q and a section, and we will get to those, during our q and a portion at the end. Moving over to, prevention gaps, duplication, and really ownership is what it counts down to. Right? What separates a client who is easy to audit from who one who isn't? What does that look like? Yeah. I mean and, actually, I think this slide does a really great job outlining that. Right? Because especially, like you said, nonprofits have a lot of mission focused people, and it is you know, sometimes they are thrown into roles, for which they didn't go to school. They don't have a lot of experience. And so there's a lot of confusion, I think, in the public about what, accountants actually do. But if you're obviously, if you work for a not for profit, if you're an executive, you're on the finance team, management and finance, you own the financial statements. Right? So it's your responsibility. So sometimes that gets that bleeds over to us and your your and your audit firm, but your audit firm isn't the one that controls your financial statements. So the simply understanding that, you know, it's a pretty big statement. And so what that means is if you understand that and then you sort of operate in such a way, then it means that you respect the process. You know, you respect the responsibilities, of each side. And the biggest thing I think is see you know, we strive, whoever we work with, CPAs, lawyers, anything, any consultants, you the best thing you can do is treat it like a partnership versus a versus a vendor customer relationship. So if you treat it like a partnership, you're in this together, that is what really helps make the content on this slide really it really pounds it home. Right? And so it it it if you follow kind of this road map, you're gonna have a a good experience with with any professional service firm, I think, but specifically here tied to audits. Yes. Love it. And kinda tapping into that same framework there, John, as well as just getting ready and preparing, and and that's kinda where we're focusing a lot of the initial conversation in here, and then we'll get really deep into it here in a in a few slides. But, we talk about the scramble. We talk about folks that may not be as prepared as they want to going into end of year or a fiscal year, etcetera. Let's say you have a client that's coming to you. We're sixty days out from filing. What's the first thing you fix? Because we've got 50 things to do. Like, what do we prioritize? Yeah. That's a great question. So every client's a little bit different in sizes and, you know, things that. And and, you know, one of the big questions that we have, big areas we have of concern are about revenue recognition. Right? Because, like, e even most small nonprofits, you know, hey. If you're using a great tool like Gramp and you've got cloud based accounting systems, you know, you'll probably have the majority of your expenses at least in there. Right? I mean and don't hold me to it because it's not full accrual, but you you're running cash through there and hopefully you're reconciling your bank account. And so you've got a lot of your expenses there. Right? And so the a lot of room a lot of key places where people can really trip up are, you know, if you are getting grants, you need to allocate those to projects or grants and things like that. And, that's on the expense side. Right? And so making sure that, you know, it isn't a complete and total fire drill to to go back and say, oh my gosh. I didn't realize that we actually have to, you know, show that we spent our funders money in this way. And that also aligns directly to the revenue question. Like, does this revenue belong in this year? Is it conditional? Is it unconditional? You know, those type of things. So, so we would attack the trial balance right away, and we would seek to triage it with sixty days out. So a quick lesson to every everyone in the call, don't do that. You know? Right? Like, you know, ahead. You know? And these days with accounting firms being so busy, you might actually have difficulty finding an accounting firm to do your nine ninety with with with that that close to the deadline. So we'll triage on your trial balance. We'll start with the easy stuff, hoping that you have bank recs and we'll just go right down there. But, you know, probably gonna, you know, jump right into revenue and, look at your costs and and, you know, if you're multi entity not for profits, which is something that we see a lot of as well, looking at your cost sharing agreements and and and things like that. So, yeah, we yeah. Hope hopefully, that answers the question. I can get into any more specifics as well. Yeah. I know. That that's perfect, John, and, appreciate the insight there. I think, just it's so important to be ultra prepared when you go into this. And I know I personally have seen it troublesome or run into a wreck when when folks start up a five zero one three c or some sort of not for profit organization, and they don't realize the the financial impact behind it, the audits, and the compliance behind it. And so it's always good to keep that top of mind and make sure that's not a burden on your back at the last minute when you're trying to do your filings. and whatnot. Yeah. Yep. We'll dive into to the next slide here. For those on the chat, feel free to, again, put your questions in the q and a. We will answer those during our q and a session here shortly. Additionally, I have a quick question for y'all in the chat. Most of you, if if not the majority, if not all of you, are somehow, involved in maybe a cause, a mission, a not for profit. Throw in the chat, what your mission serves in just a sentence or two, and and what you guys do. We'd love to love to have a good understanding because there's so many nuances to the NFP world, the not for profit world. You can be faith based. You can do all kinds of different things. So we'd love to, understand where you guys sit in that. Private schools for sure. Next question here, John. I wanna dive into organizations and the readiness for those specifically. For folks that have not been audited yet, so maybe they're newer, they've hit a certain threshold, what do they underestimate the most? That's a good question. I I think, typically, they, underestimate, the most of the time that it takes. There's a couple of things that they underestimate. First of all, the cost. Right? Again, if the person doesn't have a lot of exposure to audits when you hear that typically they're gonna cost a minimum of at least 15,000, at least in the DC area, you know, in some cases, that can be total, sticker shock to some folks. So there's so there's a cost. And then the the the extra time that your team has to, to utilize in order to prepare for the audit, you know, whether it's pulling samples, which is a free plug for something like Ramp. You know, hey. Have all have all your 18 expenses running through Ramp, and, you know, that makes that process a lot easier. One of the easiest things you can do, quite frankly. But, just, you know, overall cost and, and and just the time that it takes. And, you know, there was actually a question in the chat that I saw, and someone was asking, you know, hey. Do you have an audit readiness checklist? And, actually, Ramp conveniently has one. And, you know, that's at a fairly high level. But to answer that question as well, I would take a look at your financial statements and, you know, look at your balance sheet, look at your trial balance, and, all those things. I would start accountants classically treated accountants, as I like to say, always start with a balance sheet. So you wanna make sure, that you're always, have support for every material account on your balance sheet. And so that's a really great place to start. And like we've been talking about revenue as well, so making sure that you have copies of your grants. If you were a grant if if you're an organization that get your gets grants, making sure that you save that documentation, you at least have it someplace so that somebody can help you look through it, things like that. So, I think I think there's multiple questions. in there. Yeah. For sure. It it is it it it's so true though, John. And one I'm I'm looking at this the chat here and and all the great folks that are that are listening to us right now and tuning in. What's those are some awesome missions. We got some faith based ones. We've got some animal shelters. We've got associations. We've got different private schools. There is all botanical gardens. So, man, this is so cool. I I I and this might be nerdy of me, but I I just get chills, Yeah. listening to to what you guys are doing and how passionate about your mission you all are and, how how cool this is to to be able to serve, different organizations, different communities, whether you're a bookkeeper, and and you're doing some accounting work like John is, or you're serving a not for profit or multiple not for profits. It's really cool to see the different aspects of this and, see the missions that you serve here. And I see, Blake, I see Mindy, posted that, you know, she works for a nonprofit that does fiscal sponsorships, and that's super cool too. So that's it. Folks aren't familiar, that's that's an organization that effectively helps other nonprofits get off the ground. So that's that's, come on. really, really cool, and we see a lot of those. A lot of our clients are actually spinning out of fiscal sponsorship, so they're starting up from new and, you know, that's when we get them help get them started on great tech and great accounting. So just like you said, I echo that so many cool missions. Yes. That's so cool. Diving into everybody's favorite item within the back office, the balance sheet. Right? Everybody loves balance sheets. For those that don't know, my wife is a CPA. She focuses in on international tax, which I personally think is the most boring part of accounting she could have possibly gotten into, but that is a conversation for another day. But as it sits, one of the things, she talks about all the time is trial balances, and how important those are when you're when you're looking at, really anything, tax compliance, audit compliance, you know, really anything. And excited to to kinda jump into the balance sheet here specifically and go deeper within on cleanups. Right? I'm sure. you have a ton and and some of the other folks that are bookkeepers or support multiple not for profits or even a single not for profit, cleanups are a mess. They're tough. They're really, really difficult to get through at some point. Sometimes they're not as difficult. But John, for for from your standpoint and the experience you have in the twenty plus years you've been working with the not for profit sector, what is the cleanup actually where does the cleanup actually pile up? Is it documentation, coding, board approvals? Is there other areas that you would say that it would be like, hey. These are the two or three highlights, where those cleanups get real messy. Yeah. It's a tough question because we've we've basically, seen everything under the sun. You know, sometimes you have organizations that are just they've just I I mean, with all due respect on nothing. Right? You know? And nothing is reconciled, from you know, there's no let's just say you're on the smaller side and you're using QuickBooks or Intact and there's just nothing reconciled with respect to cash or credit cards or anything like that. You know, it's a huge usually, there are bigger problems. Right? Quite often, you have somebody that's been in an organization a long time or someone's been fired or something like that, and the the the train has really just gone off the tracks. And so what are the things what are you know, if we can get bank statements and we can get investments and credit card statements, right, we can reconcile, we can help a client reconcile those. You know, but if you look at especially you see six organizations or other organizations that have deferred revenue, stuff on the balance sheet is intrinsically more complicated because of the fact that it's a permanent account and, you know, it could go for years and years and years. And so deferred revenue is a great example where it could be years worth of transactions that you don't know how to support. And so, you know, it's a puzzle. I I won't name names, but I I once worked for an organization right out of college, and they had a massive cash clearing account. And, they hired an accountant, and, basically, that guy worked on that clearing account trying to reconcile it for at least a year. That's how bad it was. Now that was a massive, massive company, publicly traded if you can believe it. But, you know so liabilities, I think, are particularly confusing to those that aren't really trained accountants because, you know, most folks can agree, hey. Somebody owes you money or you've built somebody. They they can understand receivables. But having to reconstruct that, having to reconstruct, you know, deferred revenue, sometimes with fixed assets. Right? Fixed assets, historical content is gone, or they have never really done an inventory of their physical fixed assets. Does does anyone know if we have that desk that's 20 years old? Does anyone know where it actually is? You know? Yep. And so but also too, every every line item on this slide is great, but net assets can really be a place of confusion, especially if you've never been audited before, like tying and roll It call it rolling forward net assets. You know, if if if your books are really out of whack, it can be it can be a real challenge. So it absolutely can. Absolutely can. yeah. More more missions that you guys are posting in the chat, absolutely love to see it. We've got some that are serving 10 African countries been there, some foundations for fundraising, and, very, very cool to continue to see these roll in. So feel free to post in the chat there if you're serving a mission and, we'd love to understand what you're doing and and what you're serving, what your mission is. Jump into the the the grant revenue accounting side. Where do nonprofits in these mission based organizations most often get contribution versus exchange wrong. Yeah. It's a good question. I think it it we have organizations of all different sizes. And so, I I think it happens a lot when you have I mean, by nature of not for profit, you're gonna have programmatic or development people. I mean, they're they're usually heavily involved in actually fundraising and in the execution of the mission and things like that. And so sometimes, you know, the the whole the whole issue of a contribution versus an exchange can can really be confusing. And so, you know, in terms of where it can happen it can happen anywhere, honestly. Sure. And so what we think is it's just really important. I love this first line. Like, just because something is titled a grant or a contract, it it that that is that's only one tiny little part. You know, in in the twenty two years I've been at GRF, we've we've seen all kinds of agreements. And so, for example, I I I always laugh and, you know, almost put my head in my hands about one that I saw recently. It was like, this is in, you know, a general support unrestricted, a grant agreement, but you have to do these things with them. You know? And those things were more specific than their general mission. So it was a clearly contradictory grant agreement. So, anyway, that's just kind of an anecdote in terms of what you have to make sure that you look for, that you're reading these. But, you know, I think to your question, Blake, you know, we see we definitely see, a lot more confusion in the area of, of conditions, unconditional. Is this revenue we recognize all in 2026, or does some of this need to go to 2027 and stuff like that? So, 100%. yeah. Yeah. That's fair. And Ben had a great question in the chat as well that goes alongside the exchange. John, would you mind, just. defining. Sure. what you mind, what you mean by an exchange? And I guarantee we're gonna have another question very similar. to that later with, some of our nomenclatures that we use in the NFT sector. Yeah. For sure. So let me give you an example. So I have, clients, that get let's say they get grants from either the government or or foundation. Right? And so they get a grant. The the one of the things that we look at is who is the ultimate beneficiary. And if you're getting a grant and as long as, you know, as long as the person giving you the money isn't the beneficiary so So so let me give you an example. So, like, you get a grant to, do AIDS research. You know, that is typically going to benefit humanity, the greater public. It's a good use of public money. Right? Now let's say you're in a not for profit and you partner with a company and they say, hey. We're gonna pay you $50,000 to do a study, and that study is going back to us, the customer. Right? And so that would be considered an exchange transaction because you they are paying you for basically goods and services. And so when we say exchange, that kind of likens it to more of, like, what a for profit would do. That doesn't mean you can't do it, but that is that is Blake and I engaging in a transaction, and it's for Blake's benefit or my benefit, whereas a contribution is for the benefit of the general public. So, hopefully, that's a high level answer, the difference between exchange and contribution. And, again, it's it is okay for nonprofits to have exchange transactions, and we have many that do. Yeah. I mean, it's another way for them to raise funds for their mission in a different aspect or a different realm. And so I think it's actually critical to a lot of these organizations because it's a they have the ability, they have the what we call SME or subject matter expertise and knowledge around whatever mission they're serving to be able to raise funds or raise, exchange money, if you will, and, put more towards our mission. Yeah. For sure. And it it actually kinda goes back to sometimes people at nonprofits, they the, you know, the the the name nonprofit, actually, there there's some arguments out there that we shouldn't really call them non nonprofit entities. What we should call them instead is exempt orgs, and that refers to the section of the IRS code. Right? Because you're exempt from taxation because of what you're trying to do. And so, because it can be confusing. Hey. We're not actually allowed to generate positive net assets or net income, and you certainly are. Right? So, but, yes. So. sorry. I might get really controversial here, and I apologize for the folks I am, but I believe the NFL, National Football League, is a not for profit, technically. I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Let's get into some expenses. When you're when you're pulling in expense in testing, what do you actually need beyond receipt, invoice, etcetera? Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. So, I mean, I I think those are the baselines. Right? You know, I I think, as we said, a lot of a lot of organizations here, if you're not for profit, you know, you're gonna have program areas. You're gonna have grants potentially, things like that. So, you know, that next level of coding, that's a place where you can really invest some time. And, you know, I I I think I would call it ownership. Right? So make sure that your team owns owns it. And so what I what do I mean by that? I mean, like, you you know, put in the time, do the training, understand that costs belong to certain contracts, certain grants, certain funders, those type of things because, it will really help, emphasize best practice in getting it right the first time. And as an as a CPA and, you know, one of the things that we stress to our clients and, you know, and, is is let's get the data clean the first way the first time in. So coding is so huge and just the physical and mental owning and being like, this is my program. Right? I care about this program. I want it to be reported right. I wanna be able to execute on it right. So that's huge. The slide set has some good points as well. Just the overall approvals and policies, again, this is where a tool like Ramp really makes your life easier. You know? Accounting periods, making sure, especially near the cutoff of your calendar or fiscal year, just making sure we're in the right period. You know? Yep. We may not care if it goes in June or July depending, but we wanna make sure it's in your right fiscal year or grant reporting time window, things like that. So, and I think there are some questions that we might get to later on internal control, but, Yep. and and contribution of duty. So, you know, it can weigh in here as well. Absolutely. And these, last few slides here are fairly meaty. So I'm just gonna bounce through them a little bit quicker, and we'll get into q and a, and really start powering through some of your questions as well. So, looking at functional expenses specifically, how often does an organization find out late that it tripped the single audit threshold? What is that single audit threshold? I'm curious too. Yeah. So I they it's changed over the years. It's grown from $7.50 to a million dollars, and so what that means, and I think there's more changes coming. And what that means is you have to expend expend. That's it's not necessarily received, but it's expand more than a million dollars worth of federal funding. You know? And so that, will trigger that whole single slash uniform guidance audit. I mean, it's older terms, and newer terms. But, that is a that's a higher level of scrutiny, and it and it includes a schedule of expenditures upon of fed federal awards. So that is definitely something to be aware of. So I think, full stop, if you guys, you know, are out there and you're getting federal or state money, you really need to pay attention to the levels of funding that you're getting, and just know what you're getting into when you get government money. That you know, we were on a call with a client earlier today talking about renegotiating their NYCHA. They're negotiating direct cost rate agreement, things like that. So there's all kinds of fun that comes with, government funding. Yep. And, John, I appreciate you dropping some Gen z slang as well, with the the full stop there. That's beautiful. Right. Yeah. We'll we'll get into controls here, and I think this is what we were just referencing, John, with the segregation of duties. I I have a really, really big passion for for a lot of these missions. And we're trying to as not for profit organizations, supporting not for profit organizations, one of the one of the things we find is and it it's for a for profit too. Right? Even for profit organizations. Like, you're typically running very lean on the back office, finance, accounting, organizations, different things like that. Right? And would love to understand from your perspective, John. Let's say you have a one to three person finance team that really can't segregate duties as much as we would like. What do you tell them? Like, how do you advise them on that? Yeah. A couple different things. I'll I'll start with the the stating the obvious. Three is better than one, right, in terms of your team. Right? So so you do have, Except when a little playing more. golf. Right. Right. Exactly. So you have a few more options, of course, if you have a a a bigger team. But, you know, I I think what I would do there's a couple of things you can do. You know, and if you have one person and, you know, the the main areas are probably gonna be around cash. Right? Cash, what are the potential think about the potential areas of abuse. Right? And I start to look up and I start to look at, hey. What is your executive director? What is that person doing? Right? And if if I'm a senior accountant at at at nonprofit and my executive director is traveling all over the place violating policies and things like that, there's not a lot I can do about it. Right? But, you know, so what you can try to do is put some good policies in place. So in other words, what's a good example? That executive director's expense report, it can be coded and processed by me as the senior accountant, but it should go to the board chair or the board president for approval. And, again, like, in a tool like Ramp, it can do that. Right? And so you can make the workflow easy. So, really, these days is really no longer an excuse for, like, oh, Jimmy won't, doesn't respond to emails or or Jimmy just doesn't pick up the phone. Well, we can route this directly to him in some great technology. So that's an example, I think. Things like controls over cash, you know, you know, sending the treasurer or the board chair copies of the bank statements. Right? There are things that you can do to kind of bolster oversight over those key areas that where fraud can can kind of, can lay, if you will, or originate. So and sometimes I will say it's like Blake and I, we were having a conversation about this. Sometimes you've done everything you can do and, you know, your organization's in good shape, you know, and you're getting audited and you might just get a management comment letter comment about separation of duties. And aside from hiring additional bodies, maybe there's nothing you can do about it. So you just do the best that you can do, and, you know, you move on, you know, trying to serve. your mission. Yeah. Absolutely. And I I think to to tap into that, Jackie, on the chat there is just spot on, with, with some of the separation of duties with, a lean team. Right? And having the board president sign and approve them in a system. I think that system is actually really impactful. Right? If you're if you're using certain tools that are cost effective for your mission, of course, and and that, align with with your mission and and how you can do some back office finance ramp is one of them, of course. That segregation of duties, whether it's one person inputting the information, whether it's in an accounts. receivable solution, accounts payable, a corporate card, reimbursements, etcetera, and and having someone else through an approval process even if it's just two people, that's a great way to start too. And and then you have audit trails on them and and so on and so forth so that there's more people, touching both of them as well. Absolutely. I mean, in these days, of course, too, there's there's far less in the old older days, there was paper coming in. Right? Right. And hopefully, most of us are off paper and, you you know, what we still have there are still organizations depending on their their their their donor base. Some of them still wanna send in physical checks, so that becomes kinda it it it can become a little bit more challenging. But there's I I think overall, there's less opportunity to kind of route, you know, alter checks, route them somewhere else and stuff like that. Absolutely. Yeah. Alright. We're gonna spend about four to five minutes on this, and then we'll move into our q and a session here. Let's actually I'm gonna go ahead and jump to the next slide because I think this is gonna be pretty impactful. We already have some questions in the q and a about nine ninety, which is probably top of mind for the majority of folks here as well depending on year end or fiscal year end, etcetera. Where's the line between what a finance team can handle themselves and what needs a nonprofit tax specialist per se? Yeah. It's a really good question. So it depends on the size of your organization. So let's say, you know, you're a $75,000,000 nonprofit and you've got a CFO and you've got five or six people under you. Right? Then I would think that in that scenario, you your team should be in a pretty good position to have a very clean trial balance, supporting schedules, you know, development of the statement of functional expenses, be able to provide all the schedules that the tax preparer would need, like, you know, you know, consultants paid over $5,000 you know, all kinds of stuff. Right? Yep. So your your team should be able to do that. You know, when you get into more complex, you know, compliance issues, you know, that could bridge it could be either attorneys, or nonexempt or experts, I think you start to, I think you start that's where, you know, your tax preparer comes in, and then typically you want an outside tax preparer preparing the nine ninety and submitting it. You do location you do see I mean, not with much within our client base, but you do see clients preparing their own nine nineties. You know, they can do. that. So, so there's that aspect. That's the that's the side that I don't see as much, quite frankly. But. the side that we see is the smaller not for profits. And then again, you know, a lot of the things that we've talked about come into play. Right? The person that we're working with often doesn't have as much experience. So we often, that line then, like, moves way, way. over. Right? And so, anything from, you know, just coming up with a functional allocation to just, like, what should we be putting in the nine ninety? By the and as an aside, one of our our our nine ninety folks love to say is that, like, you know, your program accomplishments. Don't underestimate that that this these are public documents. This is your chance to describe what you do, how you do it, and what makes you awesome. Right? So so, anyway, a little bug for for for doing that, making sure you're you're using that to the best of your the best that you can. But, so it it definitely depends like most things. But, you know, I was saying to Blake yesterday that, you know, when our team does a nine ninety, we have a big old Excel document. Right? And it asks clients questions, you know, who's your board? It's all this government stuff. Right? And so we will we will always offer to get on the get on a call, walk our clients through this because if you see this thing and it's your first time doing it, you might just fall over. Right? And we don't want that. So, We all love Excel. Don't we, John? It was, maybe the nine taking away from it. Right? eighties, and and we're still using it to this day. It's, timeless. Yeah. Kind of extending on on nine nineties and just readiness, it it really does expand beyond your your trial balances. Right? And I'm curious when when you look at really everything on a return or from the compliance side and and tax filing side, Sure. which piece do you find is one of the hardest areas for a client to produce? think it's the stuff on the right. The stuff that's outside the ledger, depending on your experience, level, some folks may not expect that they have to dig down. Now some of that stuff is obviously easier than others. But let me give you an easy example. Officers, directors, and and things like that. You know, sometimes people are on autopilot, surprise, surprise. And, like, you know, we may get information. You know, CPA firms and tax preparers rely on their clients for information. And sometimes, it's it's an easy self inflicted wound to not being paying not pay attention to these things, and then you're having, you know, directors or people on your board that are haven't been with the organization in several years and things like that. But but then it keeps going. Right? Like, you know, whistleblower policies, all kinds of best practices that should be there that are really just outside debits and credits. And so I think those are often the things and also the responsibility just to review a massive document, Sure. that it's more than just a tax return. It's it's a huge informational return. So clients do have a responsibility to review that and own own that nine ninety. So, Yep. that's personally the hardest. Right? If you're accounting ducks or a row, the nonfinancial is the hardest. Yep. Very fair. And last question here before we move into q and a, and we have a ton of questions queued up. So excited to to dive into that with you, John, here. And talking about just that cleanup process we talked about earlier, going into the the next audit season if you're getting audited. If you were to give advice to a not for profit organization, what's one thing between now and the end of the year? We're just over three months till end of the calendar year and somewhere around fiscal years, of course. What is the advice you would give them for one thing to focus on? Yeah. So I love the way this slide kind of positions your first audit, as the beginning of the journey in a way is where I see this. Right? So it the one big thing to take away is how can we improve over last year? I love to look back and say, what were the adjusting journal entries or what were the management letter comments from last year? Right? And, like, every year, we should seek to get better, and we should really commit to, you know, focusing on chipping away at any of those fundamental issues. And and there's some good ones on here. Right? There's some things that you can do to really improve your finance function each year that goes by. So I think if you if you start with the future in mind because I get it. Trust me. When your audit's done, you might just be like, oh, okay. We can breathe. And you can breathe for a little bit. Right? So but but what I think you should do is then recommit to, like, give yourself a month, whatever, a month, two months later to come back and let's see what are the lessons learned, how do we how do we debrief from the audit process and and just come up with a plan. And so I guess maybe that's it. Like, it's come up with a plan for next year, and we wanna be better Yep. than last Yeah. It's at 1% every day, every week, etcetera, Yeah. and continuous improvement there. So we'll we'll jump into questions here. For for all those, I know Genevieve was kind enough to put our LinkedIn, So feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn in the chat there. We also have our direct email addresses on this slide as well if you wanna connect with us directly, afterwards. If you have any questions or curious about anything, we're happy to help, both John and I. We'll we'll start off with, our first question here. So this question is they are a lien team, and cannot completely separate every aspect of the finance duty. What's the most important compensating reviews to put in place before audit season? Oh, gosh. That's a great question. I think, I think reviews of any high level expense reports, I think, to the extent that you can, reviews of revenue recognition. And, you know, when your accounting team prepares a statement of activity or an income statement by project, please look at that. Right? And it's funny. You might think I'm trying to be funny and I'm really not, actually. It's very common where, accountants use something called professional skepticism. And it's probably obvious what that means. But, you know, when you get a report and it shows all your projects and things like that, you need to look at it. Right? And you need to kind of ask critical questions about it and be skeptical, ask questions. So I think even if you've done the work, maybe someone else in your office can do it or, you know, you can step away and come back to it. And so that also reinforces the idea of start earlier. Give yourself time to walk away from this so that you can come back if it's just you with a fresh set of eyes. You know, so so that was a couple of things that just popped into my head. Yeah. For sure. Absolutely. No. Those are perfect. There there's a few questions on checklist, Yep. for audit readiness that Ramp has. Genevieve did put that in the, chat as well. So for the folks that are wanting to have that, audit readiness checklist, we have that available. It's completely free. Feel free to leverage it. Happy to to to dive into it. And if you guys have feedback on it, let us know. We we'd love to, continue to iterate on it and and, improve it. One easy one I see, Blake, is, Yeah. Sherry asked if there's a difference between associate an association and a membership. organization. Yep. I don't think so. I will refer we love associations. So I will refer to them interchangeably. And also just as a fun fact, they can be either a five zero one c three or 501C6. It's maybe there are other things as well, but it's typically either a 501C6 or a 501C3. So I really see no difference. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. I was gonna mention the same thing. It's it's pretty interchangeable. And, it's it's kinda like, I'm a Dallas Cowboys fan, unfortunately, and it's? the same thing as what I've gone through the last thirty years of my life is, it's the same result. It's basically the same thing. You think you're gonna win the Super Bowl and, you you don't even have a a chance to get in the playoffs, but. Hardware. I digress. Hardware. We'll we'll dive into this next one. So, first time filing a nine ninety. What's the first or the one thing first thing one thing, they are most likely to overlook that could come back to bite them? Goodness. Wow. That's a that is a that's a big forum. And I have to say, I'm a I'm an accounting professional, not necessarily a tax professional. So I don't do nine nineties myself. I have a we have a team at Jira that's awesome, by the way, that does those things. So, the thing that scares me about the nine ninety is just the size of it. Yeah. And, you know, there are, you know, there are different versions of it, but let's say, you know, besides the postcard $9.90, which we would call the $9.90 n, you have $9.90 easy, then you have what we call full $9.90. So full $9.90 is exactly it's just everything. Right? It's the highest level. It's, so the breadth there is the thing that worries me. So what would you most overlook? I I mean, maybe it's an easy one, but I do think when you get sucked into the midst of the debits and credits and all all this stuff, you know, I think that you might overlook, not really using those program accomplishments and the mission descriptions, to your advantage. So that's an easy thing to overlook because you're like, oh, they can just go to our website and stuff like that. And like I said, you probably could be a little fatigued and stuff. So that's something that's overlooked often, and it is a is a very common comment when we get new clients is, like, hey. Let's go back to this. We can do better, because it is a document you all know that people pull pull your nine nineties off of websites, and so you you want that first impression to be good. So I think that's the easiest thing to overlook. Yep. Yeah. That's totally fair. I love that approach there. And, Yep. one of the final questions we have here, and I'll jump into our final slide and and tease some stuff out here on the ramp side. But, documentation gaps, the team should be looking for throughout the year. One thing that comes to mind for me, John, just to step in here before I I hand it over to you is, especially being at Ramp in in a lot of the back office spend, whether it's AP, it's card, it's reimbursements to employees or volunteers, so on and so forth. It's really document compliance, making sure that you have receipts on file, making sure that you're coding properly, making sure that you're ensuring, you have all your ducks in a row on the day to day, month to month transaction level so that everything feeds in appropriately to that, ledger. Right? But that's that's what I would probably recommend, but curious to hear your thoughts too, John. Yeah. I mean, I'm a 100% with you. Right? And it you know, I think the technology that something like Ramp offers is just so great. And, I mean, I can put my money where my mouth is. We will not take your client. But, you know, if you if you cut paper checks, or, you know, in or you're doing things that way, we we can't really work with you unless you're willing to modernize. That's how strongly we feel about these things. It just makes your life so much easier. Just remove and and it's just so incredibly cost effective. And so that's it's, you know, it's one of those things that it I hate to use the term no brainer because it sounds somewhat dismissive, but it's a no brainer. Right? And there's just so much bang for your buck there. And so like I said, like, if a client is real is not willing to undergo a digital transformation using tools like Grant, we we can't really work with them. Yeah. So that's done. how important it is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it's more costly to to not do it because, Okay. you know, you're you're working with different technology solutions and stuff like that. You're you're creating efficiency metrics there. I mean, I can't tell you the amount of conversations I've had over the last five or six years with, both partners of ours, like yourself, John at GRF, and and other partners that are in the chat there, as well as clients directly where they're cutting paper checks and and they're using very, very mundane old school ways of, taking care of the back office. They're constantly chasing receipts. They're constantly chasing invoices. They're, going overdue and and certain things like that. So it's very, very impactful and actually saves you time and money based on, just creating efficiency there and not having to tie up what you would like to give back to the mission that you serve and chasing documentation and compliance items that are should should just be an afterthought at the end of the day. Yeah. And one thing that I could add, you know, to put a fine point on it is since the beginning of this digital revolution, whatever that was, right, cloud based revolution, like, there's no there's never been a scenario where a client of ours has regretted going on something like RAM. It's never it's that that statistic is zero. Right? Like, it's it it's always and it's always, you know, it's always first on it it's very typically first on the triage list of you know, we talked earlier about clients that need cleanup or they need digital transformation stuff, like AP automation and credit card and expense reporting, it's very, very high on the triage list. 100%. Absolutely. Yeah. Alright. Just a few minutes left here, folks. I am going to head off to our, final slide here. So something I mentioned earlier is Ramp is going vertical, which we're really excited about. We've recently and not that it matters to most of you all, but we recently launched our construction real estate, within the the Ramp domain to help with very specific nuances within that, that vertical in your industry specifically. And we are just about to launch our not for profit, specific functionality within the ramp, tool. So a few of those you'll see on the screen here. You'll see supported, integrations that we have with what we call our core four and several other integrations. You you you will probably deal with QuickBooks Online and potentially Xero or Sage Intacct or some of those other systems as well. And so we're launching them out to all of the the supported integrations, and we are very excited on sales tax recovery. We are excited about grant policy agent. That that one specifically is gonna have the opportunity to put your grant compliance documents within the ramp system, and we use AI agents to basically, keep you in compliance and keep you accountable to what you're spending when you're coding to those specific grants, projects, etcetera. Full end end budgets, including grant budgets so you can track those. We'll have a grants hub that goes alongside this as well. And then, approval routing, which we're very, very excited for. This is just the first version of what we're we're shipping out there for our not for profit clients. I believe, if I'm not mistaken, not for profit is the largest vertical that Ramp currently serves right now. And it's certainly a majority of what Jaref and John's team also focuses on and specializes in as well. And so there will be more features and functionalities within the not for profit sector specifically that are gonna be launched after this as well that we can keep you all updated on, but we are very, very excited to announce this and and officially launch on October 6. If you have any questions about this, feel free to send me an email, connect with me on LinkedIn. Happy to get you in kind of an an early overview, anything like that as we get ready for our official launch on October 6. But it has been fantastic to get to meet with y'all. Jackie does have one quick question. Is Ramp compatible with Foundance Community Suite or SLM? We don't have a direct integration with either of those, Jackie, but what we do have is we have what's called a universal CSV, which is a custom import export for those specific systems. And we do have clients that are using them currently on Ramp, and excited to, to continue down that road. And we're constantly building more integrations. So hopefully, more to come there as well. But excited to, continue as, Ben mentioned in there on the not for profit vertical, serving you all to help serve your missions. And, I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day, rest of your week, rest of your month, and, rest of your filing season and audit season coming up here soon. Y'all have a great