Services

The systems
your mission
depends on,
handled.

Accounting, audit support, CFO advisory, and governance, built for nonprofits and delivered by one coordinated team.

Service areas
Accounting Audit & filings Advisory & CFO Governance
Accounting

Books you can
actually act on.

We run the full accounting cycle — transaction coding through the monthly close, fund-level reporting, and payroll — so the numbers hold up when a funder, an auditor, or a board member asks a question.

What becomes true
  • Your monthly close finishes on a predictable schedule.
  • Restricted and unrestricted balances are right, so you know what you're actually free to spend.
  • Grant and funder reports are built from fund-level records that are current and reconciled.
  • Payroll is correct and on time, and personnel costs land in the right program and grant the first time.
  • Your board packet, your Form 990, and your audit schedules all tell the same story.
Capabilities
  • Core financial operations
    Full-cycle accounting, including transaction coding, bank and credit card reconciliations, accounts payable and receivable oversight, and disciplined month-end close.
  • Fund & grant accounting
    Clear separation of restricted and unrestricted activity, grant budget monitoring, draw management, and fund-level reporting, so funds are applied in accordance with donor intent and grant requirements.
  • Financial reporting
    Monthly statement of activities, statement of financial position, statement of cash flows, and functional expense reporting, structured for board review, executive decision-making, and fiduciary oversight.
  • Payroll processing & tax filings
    Bi-weekly, semi-monthly, or monthly payroll for all employee types, with federal and state payroll tax filings, W-2s and 1099s, new-hire setup, and final pay.
  • Payroll deductions, benefits & leave
    Health, dental, vision and retirement plan deductions, open enrollment coordination, employer contribution tracking, PTO accrual, and applicable state and federal paid leave law.
  • Payroll compliance
    New-hire reporting, pay statement requirements, state payroll tax account registration, and support on employee versus contractor classification.
  • Personnel cost allocation
    Payroll expense coded accurately to programs and grants, so personnel costs flow correctly into financial statements, functional expense reporting, and grant reports.
  • Grant compliance & funder reporting
    Preparation of required external financial reporting packages for government and foundation funders, aligned with grant agreements and reporting timelines.
  • Fiscal procedures & internal controls
    Expense authorization, purchasing and signature authority, and document retention practices, including drafting the underlying policies where an organization does not yet have them.
Audit Support & Filings

Ready when the
auditor arrives.

Audits go badly for predictable reasons: records assembled under deadline, prior year findings nobody owned, program staff pulled in to answer requests. We prepare the schedules and reconciliations your auditor will ask for, answer their questions during audit fieldwork, and clear findings left over from audits that predate our engagement. The same discipline applies to your Form 990 and your state registrations.

What becomes true
  • Audit fieldwork starts with schedules already prepared and tied to the ledger.
  • The auditor's questions come to us instead of to your program staff.
  • Findings that predate our engagement get a written plan for clearing them, so they stop reappearing.
  • Your audit committee gets the materials and briefing it needs to do its work.
  • Form 990 and state renewals are filed on time, every year.
Capabilities
  • Audit readiness & auditor coordination
    Pre-audit readiness assessments, prepared-by-client schedules and reconciliations, coordination with your auditor through fieldwork, and remediation plans for findings that predate our engagement.
  • Audit committee & board support
    Materials, briefing, and presentation support so the audit committee and the full board can review the audit and its findings with the context they need.
  • Form 990 preparation & board review
    Preparation and electronic filing of Form 990, including schedule management, executive review coordination, and board review support prior to filing.
  • State regulatory compliance
    Charitable solicitation registrations and renewals, corporate annual reports or statements of information, and specialized state filings such as raffle registrations, with deadline tracking and documentation management.
Advisory / Fractional CFO

What you measure.
What it means.
What comes next.

Your financial statements tell you what already happened. The questions in front of you are about what happens next. We bring seasoned nonprofit finance leadership to the whole span, from making sure the right data gets captured to modeling the scenarios you'll need to plan against.

What becomes true
  • You know your unrestricted runway in months, and what moves it.
  • You know what an award will cost to deliver, including unrecovered indirect and reporting time, before you accept it.
  • You know which programs carry themselves and which are subsidized, and by how much.
  • Hiring, expansion, and reserve decisions get modeled before they're committed.
  • Indirect cost is understood and recovered rather than quietly absorbed.
  • The board reviews a forecast with its assumptions stated plainly.
Capabilities
  • Runway & liquidity
    Unrestricted runway analysis, cash-flow forecasting, and reserve policy modeling, so liquidity is a number you know rather than a question you avoid.
  • Budgeting & reforecasting
    Annual budget development, mid-year reforecasting, and scenario modeling grounded in program realities and funding patterns.
  • Grant & contract economics
    True-cost analysis, indirect cost rate development and recovery, match requirements, and whether a given award is worth accepting on the terms offered.
  • Program economics
    Program-level subsidy analysis, sustainability review, and modeling for expansion or wind-down.
  • Capacity & compensation decisions
    Hiring affordability, staffing models, and salary structure affordability, modeled against funding that isn't guaranteed forever.
  • Board & finance committee leadership
    A board-ready forecast with stated assumptions, finance committee support, and partnership with your treasurer.
  • Fractional CFO engagement
    Regular working sessions with the executive director and finance committee, plus availability between them when a decision cannot wait for the next one.
Governance

A board that does
more than approve.

A strong board should make the executive director’s job easier. That means a shared sense of where governing ends and managing begins, meetings that end in decisions, and directors who can test strategy and strengthen it. We advise boards and executives on the practices that get them there.

What becomes true
  • Board meetings end with decisions made and next steps clear.
  • The board strengthens strategy by testing assumptions management may be too close to see.
  • Directors bring judgment to how problems get framed, early enough to matter.
  • Hard questions surface at the board table before they become crises.
  • Board and staff know which decisions are theirs, which are the executive's, and which need both.
  • Fiduciary duties still get met, without consuming the whole agenda.
Capabilities
  • Strategic & generative governance
    Advisory support that helps boards move past fiduciary oversight into strategic and generative work: engaging the organization's direction, its framing of problems, and the long-term questions nobody has put on an agenda yet.
  • Board–executive partnership
    Clarifying roles between board and executive leadership, establishing communication norms, and strengthening the governance relationships that make candid strategic conversation possible.
  • Composition & onboarding
    Frameworks for board composition, candidate evaluation, and structured onboarding, aimed at a board equipped for the questions ahead rather than the ones already answered.
  • Meeting & decision architecture
    Agenda design, board packet development, and decision frameworks that free meeting time for deliberation instead of briefing.
  • Governance policies
    Development of board-adopted policies and practices, including conflict of interest, whistleblower, document retention, executive compensation review, and board self-evaluation.
  • Governing documents review
    Review of bylaws, articles, and resolutions against how your board actually needs to govern: whether board size, terms, committee structure, and decision rights support good decisions or quietly obstruct them.
Fit

Where we do
our best work.

Fit depends on your funding mix, in-house expertise, filing obligations, and current systems. Growth accelerates everything. An organization scaling quickly needs more, sooner. A $2M organization with three government contracts may need more from us than a $10M organization with one unrestricted funder.

Sectors we work in →
Signals of a good fit
Revenue that comes with strings: government contracts, restricted foundation funding, or funder reporting that has outgrown spreadsheets
Rapid growth, a capital campaign, or expansion plans the current finance setup was not built for
No one in-house with the training or experience to own financial strategy
An annual audit or a Single Audit, or an organization that expects one soon
An executive director or operations lead who became the de facto finance lead
A board ready to work differently, not just to hear that it should
No real financial system in place yet, whether at a young organization or a fiscally sponsored project
An annual operating budget most often between $500K and $10M, though we work with organizations outside this range where the engagement still makes sense for them
How we're built

One practice.
Fully integrated.

Accounting, audit support, advisory, and governance often sit with different providers, or with no one in particular. At accountiful they operate as a single coordinated practice, which is what makes the handoffs between them disappear.

Integrated by design. Payroll flows into functional expense reporting. Filing deadlines sit alongside audit preparation. Governance advice is informed by the actual numbers. Nothing falls between the service areas, because there are no seams between them.

One team, across all four. You work with people who hold your organization's whole picture, not four vendors each holding a piece and none holding the rest.

Why we're built this way →