The Grant Compliance Scorecard

Would your books survive a funder audit tomorrow?

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 works

Free. Three minutes. Built by the operator who runs these closes every month.

What you'll know

In three minutes you'll know:

Where your payroll actually stands

Whether your next eight payrolls clear on grant receipts you can count on — or on hope.

What you're not billing

Where funder invoices are going out late, against the wrong rules, or not at all. Most organizations we score are leaving money uncollected.

How far you are from audit-ready

How much of the auditor's request list you could hand over today — and which gaps would take three weeks of archaeology to fill.

Who's asking

Built by an operator, not a marketing team.

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.

The scorecard

Fifteen questions. Three minutes. Your score, instantly.

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.

The problem nobody names

Every grant you win makes your books harder to keep.

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.

What you get

Three certainties.

Cash certainty

You know what's in the bank, what it's actually for, and how long it lasts.

Funder certainty

Every funder invoiced on time, to its own rules, human-approved.

Audit certainty

The auditor's request list maintained year-round, not rebuilt annually.

How it works

Build. Operate. Plan.

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.

Build

One-time · about 30 days

Your financial infrastructure, designed around your actual funders — ending with the first clean close of your organization's life.

  • The Grant Rulebook — every funder's rules on one page each. Ends billing against the wrong basis.
  • A cost-allocation methodology, written and auditor-ready. Ends double-charging and "we put it all on the big grant."
  • A clean chart of accounts built for grant tracking. Ends rebuilding the same report five ways.
  • The compliance calendar — every deadline, every funder, one view. Ends quiet forfeits and late reports.
  • The system map — how your money actually moves, on one page. Ends being the only person who knows.
  • The baseline close — your first clean monthly close, dated, in writing.

Operate

Monthly
  • Every funder invoiced on time, to its own rulebook — human-approved, always. Cash comes back on schedule.
  • The Board Page — one page, plain language, same format every month. Finance becomes ten minutes of the board meeting.
  • Cash & payroll runway, always current. You always know what's yours to spend.
  • Audit-ready workpapers maintained as we go. Audit season stops costing all-nighters.
  • An open-items register. Money owed to you stops disappearing.

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.

Plan

Strategic
  • The annual budget, built around your actual grant cycles — board-ready, not copied from last year.
  • Staff allocation strategy — who's funded by what, designed deliberately across grants instead of by default.
  • Scenario planning — if a major grant lapsed or landed tomorrow: what changes, what you'd cut or add, and when you'd know.
  • New-grant math — what that next award really does to your overhead, match, and cash flow, before you sign.
  • Reserve targets — how much operating reserve you should hold, and the plan to get there.

What you won't have to do

  • Change software — we work inside your QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Time, and existing payroll provider.
  • Learn a new system or train your staff on one.
  • Prepare for the audit — the binder is maintained year-round; you hand it over.
  • Hand over the ability to move money — bank access is read-only. If you ever want payments prepared for you, it's we-create-you-approve, with controls, never unilateral.
  • Give up control — approvals stay with you; nothing goes to a funder without your sign-off.
  • Do cleanup homework first — messy books are the starting condition, not a disqualifier.

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.

Timeline

Value starts in days, not quarters.

One business day

Your first Grant Rulebook — your scariest funder's rules, on one page. (Free, even if we never work together.)

Week 1

System and grant review — every agreement read, every deadline mapped.

Week 2

The restricted-cash answer: how much of your cash is actually yours to spend.

First full cycle

The baseline close — the first clean monthly close of your organization's life, dated, in writing.

Monthly after

Invoices, Board Page, runway, workpapers — the system compounds instead of decays.

The economics

Compare the real alternatives.

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 bookkeeper21 Light StreetNonprofit CFO
Typical cost$1,500–$2,000/moOne-time build, then $2,500/mo$120K+/yr full-time; $3–6K/mo fractional
Knows each funder's billing rulesRarely — records transactions, doesn't read grant agreementsThe Grant Rulebook is the foundation of the systemSometimes — depends on grant experience
Audit preparationYou still do the archaeologyBinder maintained year-roundDirects it — often with you still gathering
Cash & payroll runwayNoAlways current, eight weeks outYes
Gets better as you win grantsFire drills stay fire drillsEvery new funder becomes one more rulebook pageDepends 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 guarantee

You shouldn't have to take a stranger's word for it.

Simple

100% satisfaction — and you can cancel anytime.

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.

Fit

Built for a specific organization.

This is for you if

  • Nonprofit, roughly $250K–$1M budget
  • Three or more funding streams, and growing
  • Finance is run by the ED at night, a part-time bookkeeper, or a board treasurer
  • You can't say whether staff are allocated across grants the best way
  • You don't know if any grant is at risk of an audit finding today

Not for

  • Organizations with a full-time finance director they're happily paying $120K+
  • Organizations that aren't growing — shrinking budgets or winding down
  • First-grant startups — start with the free rulebook below
Who's behind this

An operator, not an agency.

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.

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Already know you need this?

Skip the scorecard. Email me.

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.

Free — no call, no pitch

The Free Grant Rulebook.

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.