Introduction to Grant Accounting Series
This series is for anyone interested in grant accounting: it contains information I would have liked to know before serving as a grant accountant or performing single audits as an auditor. It’s primarily formatted for small to midsized nonprofits who are using Quickbooks or a related software that is not fund accounting (Stay tuned for a blog on what is fund accounting).
What makes me an expert? I’m a CPA who got into accounting to help nonprofits, and have spent most of the last 15 years doing just that. I was a grant accountant for a mid-sized nonprofit, tracking 30-40 contemporaneous grants in a Quickbooks environment. Before and after that, I was an auditor who has performed many single audits.
I’m not the most “expertly” expert out there, but want to be! For now, I will settle for helping my dear audience learn these things the easy way, the way I wish I had learned. To that end, feel free to reach out on any tips, inconsistencies or questions – I will be keeping this blog series updated as much as possible, and I appreciate your help in doing so.
So why are you here? Maybe it’s a new revenue stream for your nonprofit, or maybe you are new to a nonprofit with grants, either as an employee in a finance-related role, or an outsourced bookkeeper who hasn’t had much experience in this area. Or, maybe you are a new auditor who is staring down the business end of your first single audit.
At any rate, it’s a new environment with its own concepts and challenges. Tracking grants can be tricky and is full of complicated context and grey areas – but ANAPF has some Best Practices in Grant Management that you should be aware of first. I hope I can shed some light on the complexity of the rest of it, through this series, although I can warn you in advance: you are going to get tired of me answering a lot of questions with “maybe.”
This blog series contains following sections, which will be updated with links as I finish them (so feel free to check back):
1. The pre-award period
2. Recording the grant award
3. The mature grant: expenses and revenues
4. Closing the grant
Of course, the invitation is always open to hear from you about any grant-related challenges I missed during this series. As always, good luck out there, and thanks for all the work you do to improve our communities and our society!
