The Three Certainties Quiz
Would your books survive a funder audit tomorrow?
Ten questions across the three things a growing nonprofit can never afford to guess about — cash, funders, and the audit. Instant score and your weakest pillar, no call required to get them.
Free. Three minutes. Built by the operator who runs these closes every month.
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.
The three certainties
Three things every ED and CEO should be certain about.
Cash certainty
How much cash is in the bank? What is it actually for? How much of it can I spend on anything at all?
Funder certainty
What kind of grant did I just win? What are its rules? How do I actually get the money?
Audit certainty
Could I produce the backup today — or am I rebuilding it the night before? And would it even be enough?
Who's behind this
An operator, not an agency.
Joshua Gonzales — 15 years in nonprofit finance. I run these closes every month, today. 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.
What that means monthly
- Multi-grant billing under county cost-reimbursement contracts
- Active fiscal monitoring
- Payroll across restricted funding streams
- The audits that follow
How it works
Review. Build. Then run it with your team.
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.
What you won't have to do
- Change software — we work inside your QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Time, and existing payroll provider
- Prepare for the audit — the binder is maintained year-round; you hand it over
- Give up control — bank access is read-only, and approvals stay with you
- Do cleanup homework first — messy books are the starting condition, not a disqualifier
01The Finance Operations Review
$3,500 · about 2 weeksBefore 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.
- Allocation review — how shared costs are actually being split, and whether that would survive an auditor's question.
- Compliance posture — each funder's real obligations against what is actually happening.
- Restriction tracking — how much of your cash is genuinely yours to spend.
- Audit-risk read — which grant would hurt most if it were examined tomorrow, and why.
- The findings letter — what is true, what it is costing you, and what to do about it, in priority order.
The findings letter is yours whether or not you go further. If you do, it doubles as the build proposal.
02The Build
One-time · about 30 daysYour 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.
- A cost-allocation methodology, written and auditor-ready.
- A clean chart of accounts built for grant tracking.
- The compliance calendar — every deadline, every funder, one view.
- The system map — how your money actually moves, on one page.
- The baseline close — your first clean monthly close, dated, in writing.
03Operate With Them
Time-boxed · 60–90 daysWe run the installed system on your books — with your bookkeeper, not instead of them. You train by operating together.
- Every funder invoiced on time, to its own rulebook — human-approved, always.
- The Board Page — one page, plain language, same format every month.
- Cash & payroll runway, always current.
- Audit-ready workpapers maintained as we go.
- An open-items register.
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 are available — an operator we supply and supervise for the monthly close, and a finance-manager layer for grant budgets, allocation matrices, and utilization analysis. Take one, both, or neither. Your part of onboarding: read access to the books, copies of your grant agreements, and one kickoff hour.
Proof of work
Everything is a document you can hold.
The Grant Rulebook is the foundation: one page per funder — billing basis, required documentation, disallowed costs, every deadline as a real date, and the ways organizations get burned by that contract type.
Show it to your board, hand it to an auditor, give it to whoever runs finance next. It all lives in your accounts, belonging to you.
- Grant Rulebook — one page per funder
- Board Page — plain language, same format every month
- Compliance calendar — every deadline, every funder, one view
- Findings letter — what is true, and what to do first
- Allocation methodology — written and auditor-ready
- Baseline close packet — dated, in writing
Free — no call, no pitch
The Free Grant Rulebook.
Send one grant agreement — the funder whose rules scare you most. Within one business day you get back its one-page rulebook, built from your actual agreement.
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.
The Three Certainties Quiz
Ten questions. Three minutes. Your score, instantly.
Three on cash, three on funders, four on the audit — every one of them scored. Answer first; we ask where to send the written version at the end.
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 above
The guarantee
100% satisfaction — and you can cancel anytime.
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.
Already know you need this? Email me.
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.