When you win your next grant, it's just good news.
Financial infrastructure for arts & culture nonprofits whose money comes with rules — built and run by an operator who does this every month, today.
Get a free grant rulebookOne operator. Three founding slots this year. Two remain.
This isn't bookkeeping. Bookkeeping records what happened. This is financial infrastructure — the rulebooks, calendars, allocations, and monthly close that keep six funders' rules true in your books at once, so growth stops breaking the back office.
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 for every funder. You invoice late because billing wrong scares you. If a big grant went away, you're not sure you could make payroll. And every audit costs all-nighters — yours and your staff's. Not because you're bad at this. Because it was never supposed to be your job. You started this to make art.
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. Restricted vs. unrestricted, current every month — and your runway, eight weeks out.
Every funder invoiced on time, to its own rules, human-approved. The money comes back on schedule. Nothing owed to you gets forgotten.
The auditor's request list maintained year-round, not rebuilt annually. Audit season becomes handing over a binder that already exists.
Every funder you have gets one of these: one page that turns a 40-page agreement into rules you can actually run — how it pays, what you must document, what it won't cover, every deadline as a real date, and the ways organizations get burned by that exact type of contract.
A complete sample rulebook, exactly as a client would receive it. Judge the work itself.
Want one for your own grant instead of a sample? That's free — get yours here.
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.
The close, run every month — so the system gets better with every grant instead of worse.
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.
The piece no bookkeeper offers: someone to think ahead with — before you sign the next grant, not after.
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.
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.
The work above is inspectable before you commit. The rest of the risk, we carry:
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.
Five a month, first come first served. Uploads must be redacted; the intake page explains exactly how the file is stored and deleted.