Take the 3-minute Grant Compliance Scorecard: 15 questions about how your organization handles grants, payroll, and reporting. Instant score, three personalized fixes — no call, no pitch.
Get your score See how it worksFree. Three minutes. Built by the operator who runs these closes every month.
Whether your next eight payrolls clear on grant receipts you can count on — or on hope.
Where funder invoices are going out late, against the wrong rules, or not at all. Most organizations we score are leaving money uncollected.
How much of the auditor's request list you could hand over today — and which gaps would take three weeks of archaeology to fill.
These 15 questions are the same checks Joshua Gonzales runs every month on a real multi-grant arts nonprofit — county cost-reimbursement contracts, active fiscal monitoring, payroll across restricted funding streams, and the audits that follow. Fifteen years in nonprofit finance.
This is what the output of that system looks like: open a sample Grant Rulebook →
Ten questions score how your organization actually runs. Five help us 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.
You know what's in the bank, what it's actually for, and how long it lasts.
Every funder invoiced on time, to its own rules, human-approved.
The auditor's request list maintained year-round, not rebuilt annually.
Three pieces. The build is custom to your funders and done in about 30 days — the foundation of your financial infrastructure. Operating keeps it true every month. Planning is where it starts paying you back. 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.
Your financial infrastructure, designed around your actual funders — ending with the first clean close of your organization's life.
Already have a bookkeeper you trust? Keep them. We don't pay bills or chase receipts — that stays with your team. Operate is about what gets produced every month, whoever holds the ledger. And if your bookkeeper wants to learn to run these workflows themselves, that's a conversation we welcome.
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.)
System and grant review — every agreement read, every deadline mapped.
The restricted-cash answer: how much of your cash is actually yours to spend.
The baseline close — the first clean monthly close of your organization's life, dated, in writing.
Invoices, Board Page, runway, workpapers — the system compounds instead of decays.
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 | One-time build, then $2,500/mo | $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 |
Cost figures are typical market ranges; your actuals may differ. Exact pricing is discussed after the fit conversation — founding clients receive a founding rate that ends when the case studies exist.
If a month of service doesn't meet the standard we agreed to, 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.
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 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.
Two founding slots remain this year. Write to josh@21lightstreet.com — a line or two about your organization and your funders is plenty. I reply personally within two business days.
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.