Grant compliance support

Each grant is set up as its own class, project, or location tag depending on your accounting platform, so a report filtered to one award shows only that award's activity, matched against its approved line-item budget. We build a budget-to-actual tracker updated on your normal close cadence, not just at the funder's reporting deadline, so variance gets caught while there is still time to reallocate or ask the funder a question.

Drawdown and reimbursement requests are prepared with the underlying detail, such as timesheets for allocated salary or receipts for direct costs, attached rather than summarized away. For federal awards approaching or past the $1,000,000 single-audit threshold, we also prepare the Schedule of Expenditures of Federal Awards and organize a grant file structured around the award agreement, approved budget, correspondence, and receipts, ready for a single-audit reviewer or program officer to work through without a scramble.

We start by reviewing every active award agreement and budget you hold, since the reporting calendar, allowable-cost rules, and indirect-cost treatment can differ meaningfully between a federal grant, a state contract, and a foundation gift, even when the dollar amounts look similar. Each award gets set up as its own tracked segment in your accounting system before any current-period activity is coded to it.

From there, monthly coding runs alongside your regular close, with expenses matched to budget lines as transactions post. Ahead of each funder reporting deadline, we assemble the report from the tracked detail, review it against the award terms with your program staff, and submit or hand it off on the schedule the award requires. If your cumulative federal spend is approaching the single-audit threshold, we flag that early enough to plan for it rather than discover it at year-end close.

Nonprofits, universities, and research organizations managing one or more federal, state, or foundation grants are the core fit, particularly once award count or dollar volume makes manual tracking in a spreadsheet unreliable. Organizations approaching or past $1,000,000 in annual federal awards need this specifically to prepare for the single audit that threshold triggers.

It also fits any organization managing a mix of restricted and unrestricted revenue where the board or funder wants to see net assets released from restriction tracked cleanly, since that presentation depends on the same underlying grant-by-grant tracking discipline this work builds.

The most common issue we see is grant revenue and spending recorded into the same general ledger accounts as unrestricted operating activity, with no way to isolate a specific award's balance without manually re-sorting transactions after the fact. Close behind that is a budget that lives only in the original grant proposal PDF, never updated or compared against actual spend until the funder's annual report is due.

We also regularly find indirect costs allocated inconsistently across awards, sometimes at the negotiated rate, sometimes estimated, with no documentation showing which method applied to which grant in which period. Timesheets supporting payroll charged to a grant are another frequent gap, since federal awards specifically require documented time allocation for any staff member whose salary is partly or fully charged to the award.

Class or project tracking runs inside QuickBooks Online or Xero for smaller organizations, and inside NetSuite's project or fund-accounting module for larger or multi-award nonprofits that need tighter segmentation. Excel remains the standard format for the budget-to-actual tracker and the Schedule of Expenditures of Federal Awards, since that is what most funders and single-audit firms expect to receive and review.

Where a funder requires submission through a specific federal portal, such as for HHS or Department of Education awards, we prepare the underlying figures and reconcile them to your books, while the actual portal submission is handled by your organization or its designated signer.

Pricing depends on how many active grants you hold, how many carry federal single-audit exposure under the $1,000,000 federal-expenditure threshold, how many separate funders each carry their own reporting calendar and requirements, and how much cleanup is needed before ongoing tracking starts cleanly. A nonprofit with two grants and clean prior-year records costs less to bring current than one with a dozen active awards, several near the single-audit threshold, and no consistent grant-by-grant tracking in place today. See the pricing note below for how the fee gets confirmed once we understand your grant count and funder mix.

Every grant report and Schedule of Expenditures of Federal Awards goes through a senior review before it reaches your program staff or a funder, checking that expenditure detail ties back to the general ledger and that the budget-to-actual comparison matches the award's approved line items exactly, not an approximation of them.

We keep a running log of any cost flagged as possibly unallowable under an award's terms, along with how it was ultimately resolved, since a single-audit reviewer or program officer frequently asks how the organization handles exactly that kind of judgment call, not just whether the final numbers look clean.