Dear ABC Live!

The Classic

• “How do we know if we can afford to hire?”

Deficit Budgets

• “When is it okay to pass a deficit budget? And also how much %-wise is too large/risky for a reasonable deficit budget?”
• “How do we know how much of a deficit in our budget it is okay to run on for the year, as a nonprofit?”

Info Sharing

• “How do we share takeaways of our budget to potential donors or worker owners without getting too in the weeds? What are the most important/relevant things to share?”

Learning about bookkeeping

• “After being laid off due to financial mismanagement, I find myself wanting to more deeply understand finance and maybe even specialize in it. I have two questions. How can you put in checks and balances so a budget deficit so significant it requires layoffs isn’t kept hidden. And how does someone without an accounting degree become a bookkeeper?” 
• “How can I get trained on basic accrual accounting? I do bookkeeping but I’m new to finance. I want to understand why we do things the way we do.”

Organizing Internal Finance Processes

• “We find that updating our Actual Income and Expenses to compare against our Projected Income and Expenses is so time consuming, it is hard to keep up with. We wanted to do it monthly, then moved to quarterly, but it’s still so time consuming. (For context, we are a nonhierachical collective. We have a big enough org (9 staff, over $1million budget) but we don’t have a CFO or accountant, only an Operations person who does payroll and other finance-related stuff, but she is not an accountant. We outsource to contract accountants but they don’t get into this kind of nitty-gritty). We have a Finance Team but no one on the team is an accountant. Do you have recommendations for software, processes, or procedures for how to quickly and easily compare our Actuals to Projections? Maybe we just need an org training on this one issue.”

Mutual Aid Collective Payments

• “We are a mutual aid collective trying to make it so that multiple people can log into our payment apps (Cash App, Zelle, etc) and coming up against the limitations of everything having to be 2FA’d. Are there any recommendations you have about how best to get around this so multiple people in our collective can send money?”

Board involvement

• “How do I get the rest of my Board more involved in the finances of our organization? We will be facing a deficit and cash flow problems by Q1 and need to consider options for borrowing but our Treasurer is against it and stymies positive group discussion”

Fiscal Sponsors

• “What is the best practice and/or appropriate/reasonable turn-around time for a Fiscal Sponsor (or outsourced Accounting team) to send/deliver financial reports to an organization? Is over a month reasonable? Is two months reasonable? Trying to ascertain in terms of having current financials to guide decision-making esp. with very tight cashflow.”
• “What is a reasonable amount of time to receive monthly reports from my Fiscal Sponsor? Do Fiscal Sponsors typically include a report with the month’s itemized breakdown of income and expenses?”
• “What are appropriate expectations for working with a fiscal sponsor in terms of turn around time on financial reporting, transaction requests. We have built out best practices with our fiscal sponsor, a local, aligned 501c3 organization with close ties to our cooperative ecosystem, but they are often falling behind on those agreed upon practices. We know why this is happening (one person holding all of the work) but are struggling to appropriately manage our finances as a result.”

Grant and Donation Tracking

• “We are trying to track our grants using customers and projects in Quickbooks. It works well a lot of the time, but when someone’s salary is covered by 4 different grants, for example, we’re having trouble figuring out an efficient way to track that. It doesn’t make sense to split every line in a payroll journal into 4 separate lines, right? Do we need to track the spend-down using more than Quickbooks? How do we make grant accounting easy and efficient?!”
• “Here’s my question: we don’t track donations as part of our budget. Are we supposed to?? For reference, we are a social services org that does a lot of food insecurity work, and we get a ton of donations of food and supplies. Are we supposed to be assessing the value of those things and including them in our budget?”

Chart of Accounts

• “We can’t seem to get our Quickbooks chart of accounts to look like our budget categories and it makes importing the actuals very challenging after the close of each month. In the meantime we can’t compare our budget vs actual because the numbers are accurate. Any tips!?”

Worker Coop Patronage

• “Worker-owned cooperatives often need guidance on how to disperse patronage without compromising cashflow. If you have some strategies or tips on how coops can handle that, I think a lot of people would benefit. For our own coop, I had to create a complicated spreadsheet from scratch to schedule out both Cash Payouts (related to the previous year’s profit sharing) as well as ICA payouts (to chip away at the contents of ICAs to avoid a snowball effect when those amounts come due by their Bylaws-prescribed deadlines.) I couldn’t find any resources online to help with this sort of planning, so I had to just think about it and run test calculations until I figured it out myself. It was a headache, but it was necessary to make sure we could honor our patronage obligations without sacrificing cashflow stability.”

…and maybe a question from you if you tune in live!