Fifteen questions across the three things a growing nonprofit can never afford to guess about — cash, funders, and the audit. Instant score and your three biggest gaps, no call required to get them.
Take the quizFree. Three minutes. Built by the operator who runs these closes every month.
The Three Certainties Quiz tells you exactly where your gaps are in each one.
How much cash is in the bank? What is it actually for? How much of it can I spend on anything at all?
What kind of grant did I just win? What are its rules? How do I actually get the money?
Could I produce the backup today — or am I rebuilding it the night before? And would it even be enough?
Joshua Gonzales — 15 years in nonprofit finance. I run these closes every month, today: multi-grant billing under county cost-reimbursement contracts, active fiscal monitoring, payroll across restricted funding streams, and the audits that follow. The ten scored questions below are the same checks I run on real books.
The system this service installs is the one I operate daily — refined in the field, not designed in a slide deck. I use modern tools the way a good accountant uses Excel — daily and fluently, AI included. The tools do the reading; I make the calls. The judgment comes from the scars, not the software.
This is what the output of that system looks like: open a sample Grant Rulebook → · LinkedIn ↗
Ten questions score your three certainties — cash, funder, audit. Five help make the results specific to you. Nothing is stored anywhere except to send you your results — no list-blasting, ever.
Every funder brings its own rules — billing basis, documentation, deadlines, disallowed costs. Every rule adds hours. The hours come out of the mission.
So you rebuild the same report five ways, invoice late because you're scared to bill wrong, run payroll on hope, and spend three weeks a year doing archaeology for the audit. Not because you're bad at this — because you were never supposed to be doing it.
Success is what breaks the spreadsheet. This service exists so that winning more never costs you your nights again.
Three stages, in order. The Review establishes what is actually true. The Build is your financial infrastructure, custom to your funders, in about 30 days. Then we run the monthly cycle alongside your team until they can run it without us. Everything produced is a document you can hold, show your board, or hand an auditor — and it all lives in your accounts, belonging to you.
Before anyone proposes a fix, someone reads everything — every grant agreement, every allocation, every place the current setup is carrying risk that is invisible from inside it.
The findings letter is yours whether or not you go further. If you do, it doubles as the build proposal — you already know exactly what is being built, and why.
Your financial infrastructure, designed around your actual funders — ending with the first clean close of your organization’s life.
We run the installed system on your books — with your bookkeeper, not instead of them. You don’t stop operating and start training. You train by operating together.
This stage has an end date written into the contract. Your bookkeeper learns the monthly workflows by running them under supervision; if you don’t have one, we can supply one. What we never do: pay bills or chase receipts — that stays with your team.
After the bridge, two ongoing layers — take one, both, or neither. They are deliberately separate, because they are different work: one is the monthly labor, the other is the judgment.
A bookkeeper we supply and supervise, running the installed system on your books every month — with our quality gate behind them.
Already have a bookkeeper you trust? Keep them — stage three trains them, and this layer simply isn’t needed.
The judgment layer — the work that decides where the money goes, not just where it went.
Priced per piece of work, or bundled monthly if you would rather have it standing. A smaller organization may only want budget season; a grant-heavy one wants it always available.
Your part of onboarding: read access to the books, copies of your grant agreements, and one kickoff hour. If you can forward PDFs, you can onboard.
Your first Grant Rulebook — your scariest funder’s rules, on one page. (Free, even if we never work together.)
Every grant agreement read, every deadline mapped, every allocation traced.
The findings letter — including the restricted-cash answer: how much of your cash is actually yours to spend.
Rulebooks, allocation methodology, chart of accounts, compliance calendar, system map — ending in the baseline close: the first clean monthly close of your organization’s life, dated, in writing.
We run the monthly cycle with your team — invoices, Board Page, runway, workpapers — until they can run it without us.
The money for this usually already exists inside your grants — admin lines, indirect cost recovery, and reimbursements currently leaking as unbilled or misbilled. This often pays for itself out of money you're entitled to but not collecting cleanly.
| Part-time bookkeeper | 21 Light Street | Nonprofit CFO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical cost | $1,500–$2,000/mo | $3,500 Review, then a fixed-price build — monthly support only if you want it | $120K+/yr full-time; $3–6K/mo fractional |
| Knows each funder's billing rules | Rarely — records transactions, doesn't read grant agreements | The Grant Rulebook is the foundation of the system | Sometimes — depends on grant experience |
| Audit preparation | You still do the archaeology | Binder maintained year-round | Directs it — often with you still gathering |
| Cash & payroll runway | No | Always current, eight weeks out | Yes |
| Gets better as you win grants | Fire drills stay fire drills | Every new funder becomes one more rulebook page | Depends entirely on the person |
| Who runs it a year from now | Them — and it leaves when they do | Your own team, trained on the system — or an operator we supply and supervise | Them — and it leaves when they do |
Cost figures are typical market ranges; your actuals may differ. The Review is $3,500. Everything after it is quoted from what the Review actually finds — a fixed price, in writing, before any work starts. No discounts, no introductory rates: the build is priced on what it saves you.
If a month of service doesn't meet the standard we agreed to — written into your engagement letter, not left to interpretation — you don't pay for it. No long contracts, no lock-in — and if you leave, everything we built goes with you. It's your infrastructure, in your accounts.
Write to josh@21lightstreet.com — a line or two about your organization and your funders is plenty. I reply personally within two business days. I take a small number of builds at a time, so the honest answer about timing comes in that first reply.
Send one grant agreement. Within one business day you get back its one-page rulebook — like this one, but for your grant.
Billing basis, the documentation you must keep, disallowed costs, every deadline as a real date — and the most common ways organizations get burned by that exact type of contract. It's yours either way; if it's useful, imagine one for every funder you have.
Get your free rulebook →Five a month, first come first served. Uploads must be redacted; the intake page explains exactly how the file is stored and deleted.