Many nonprofit organizations of all sizes often struggle with their accounting and finance function. This is true whether they have a part-time bookkeeper, a full-time staff accountant or even a finance office with multiple staff.

Tosha Anderson, founder of The Charity CFO, joined us to share finance and accounting insights that have worked with hundreds of nonprofits. In this episode, she helps listeners

• identify accounting issues within their organization
• prepare for their annual audit
• understand how their finance office should evolve as the organization grows
• learn about technology to improve their accounting systems

Tosha has worn many hats during her 15 years of working with and for nonprofits. She has been an auditor, a CFO, a board member, a volunteer, and a consultant. She is with us today to share the wealth of experience that has allowed her to build The Charity CFO, a full-service accounting firm specializing in nonprofit accounting.

Listen Here!

Links:

(The 45-minute training session has expired)

Tosha’s website

Expensify

Quickbooks

Bill.com

Receipt Bank

Timestamped Highlights:

(2:15) The most common accounting and auditing challenges that nonprofits experience

(7:25) How Tosha handles her most challenging auditing clients.

(8:55) Ways to enhance your accounting and finance function as your nonprofit’s income grows.

(11:00) Ways that software and apps can strengthen your accounting function without adding additional staff.

(12:45) How to tell whether you need more staff or just need to train your bookkeeper for new roles.

(16:10) Tosha’s favorite software and apps that support your bookkeeping and accounting.

(25:45) Timesheet tracking technologies that work for nonprofits.

(28:35) The importance of a positive relationship between your accountant and funders.

Episode 136 Transcript

Dolph Goldenburg: (00:00)
Welcome to the successful nonprofits podcast. I’m your host Dolph Goldenberg. Our guest today is none other than Tasha Anderson, founder of the charity CFO through which she has worked with hundreds of small nonprofits offering affordable accounting and finance office solutions. Tasha and I met actually through a mutual client. I had facilitated their board retreat and her firm provides CFO services to the organization. Now I typically follow up three months after retreat just to ask how things are going and if there’s any additional support that they might need. And in that followup, the chief executive of the organization gushed about the amazing new accounting services she was receiving from the Charity CFO. Now since I found out through her that Tosha provides services all over the country and because I am often asked by clients and others for good accounting referrals, I asked for an introduction and scheduled a 30-minute meeting with Tosha.

Dolph Goldenburg: (01:07)
Now you know a meeting is good. If we schedule 30 minutes and we both decide we’re going to speak for about 75 minutes and we had such a great conversation that I knew we had to have her on the podcast because she has so much good information to share with our listeners. So Tosha has worn many hats during her 15 years of working with and for nonprofits. She’s been an auditor, a CFO, a board member, a volunteer, and a consultant. And as I’ve already said, she is with us today to share the wealth of experience that has allowed her to build a full-service accounting firm specializing in nonprofit accounting. Our conversation is undoubtedly going to cover a lot, but it will, it definitely includes a thorough discussion of the way your finance office must evolve as the organization grows. Hey Tosha, welcome to the podcast.

Tosha Anderson: (02:04)
Thanks Dolph, super excited to be here!

Dolph Goldenburg: (02:06)
So not many people who enter the nonprofit sector actually do that through accounting. So tell us, how did you get started in nonprofit accounting?

Tosha Anderson: (02:18)
That’s always a funny question though because I stumbled across as I find most people that work in the nonprofit space never plan on going into the nonprofit space and they certainly, uh, never thought they would be there. Right. And I started my career in public accounting. I spent a couple of years there specializing in construction, initially had the opportunity to move into the nonprofit practice that was the area that no one else wanted to work in. I was an ambitious young professional looking to get promoted and make a way for myself. So I took up the challenge and really realized how difficult it is to audit and manage the accounting and finances for nonprofits and how much there was a talent shortage for people that understood that type of work. And because of all of those things, high turnover, short talent pools, limited resources to hire the right people or any people for that matter, I noticed that there were a lot of issues around the accounting and finance departments.

Tosha Anderson: (03:24)
So frankly, it made it really difficult to work in that space. And I switched my mindset a little bit and decided instead of kind of dwelling on some of the negatives to create myself an opportunity to train work with an educate the folks that are running on profits so that hopefully we can turn things around for them. So at that point, taking something that I kinda disliked a challenge, I didn’t know if I was ready when I decided to make it a career focus of mine. I left auditing after I audited nonprofits for seven years and I decided to entrench myself even further into that industry by being a CFO of a nonprofit. So now I’d like to just say I’m a CFO of many nonprofits now, so it was completely by accident. But, you know, here I am and now I’m loving it.

Dolph Goldenburg: (04:14)
So let’s talk real quick about your auditing experience. So you’ve already mentioned that as an auditor you saw there was often a lack of skillset. There was a high turnover. How did that exhibit itself among nonprofits? Like, so as an auditor or what issues did you see that you really attributed to maybe not having the right skills and the finance function, a frequent turnover, that type of thing?

Tosha Anderson: (04:38)
Yeah, low level of documentation and evidence for things, misapplied, you know, payments, incorrect billings, lack of billing to funders, poor cashflow issues with some messy set of books overall. And sometimes them not even knowing that they were messy. Sometimes they were not even auditable. We couldn’t get through the grant or the contract audit because they didn’t have any documentation. They didn’t have any substantiation for any of the transactions the services delivered, truthfully because they didn’t know that they needed to even keep that information. So those were generally some of the main issues or concerns around auditing nonprofits, especially those ranging between 250,000 to say three or 4 million, which is kind of our core client base. They don’t have someone full time, they don’t have someone experienced yet. They were starting to get the complexities that comes with expanded funding, but didn’t understand all of the contract components that they needed to manage.

Dolph Goldenburg: (05:43)
So I have to ask, because I almost never hear about an organization that’s truly unauditable. So what do you do as an auditor when you walk in and you’re like, you have nothing that I could possibly use to audit you with, what do you actually do?

Tosha Anderson: (05:57)
So now you call me a, I’ve been referenced as the cleanup crew. So we go in, we’ve actually had to remove ourselves from that engagement. If there’s truly nothing to look at, we can’t audit them. We, we have to back out of the engagement. In that particular case, they had to then go back to the funder and explained to them, which we never wanted to do. Audit firms by nature now can’t actually do the work. So they have to find someone like myself or another professional that can come in and help the organization find what they need in order to put the pieces together. Right. So in some cases I just had a client, they’ve struggled to get through an audit the last couple of years. They engaged us in June. We had an audit by mid July, so just a month and a half later. And we were calling different vendors to get copies of invoices. We were calling the bank to get copies of checks that were deposited. We were calling the funders to get copies of the contracts, all of those sorts of things. Looking through our credit card statements to see if we can get things reproduced. Quite frankly, it’s a lot of work, but if we can do a little bit of that and going forward each month and put processes in place to retain that information, it makes a lot easier on the back.

Dolph Goldenburg: (07:18)
Right, right. It’s interesting. I actually have one client where, in order for them to be able to do the audit, people were like opening desk drawers and looking for receipts. And that was the point in which is like, yeah, you’re going to have to bring someone in from the outside to clean this up because that’s not where you should be keeping your receipts crumpled up in desk drawers.

Tosha Anderson: (07:38)
Yes, yes we were, we were doing that. We were going through several different desks, several different drawers, file cabinets everywhere where we can possibly find documentation. You know, believe it or not, we pulled it off. We had no adjustments to the audit, which I think was the first time in history. But I think we had three CPAs from my team working on their accounts receivable alone, so it was pretty bad. Um, so that’s why most of my referrals come from auditing firms that know that they have clients, that it’s really difficult to audit. Things are messy. So they bring us in to hopefully clean things up and keep it, keep it clean moving forward.

Dolph Goldenbur: (08:20)
And my guess is that organizations that end up with those types of issues probably back into them. So you know when, when in an organization’s first year when it only has five or $10,000 of income, you probably don’t need an audit and it’s really easy to kinda keep track of your income and expense in Excel or even a paper file frankly and complete your 9-90 so, so what needs to happen with the evolution of a finance office as an organization goes from that really early start-up of you know, under $25,000 of revenue to a hundred thousand or a quarter-million dollars?

Tosha Anderson: (08:54)
That’s a great question. I think, I think that answer has changed and evolved as technology has evolved and you would be quite amazed to see how much you can do with little capacity internally. That’s one of the things my firm focuses so much on deploying technology to help us better organize, digitize and track a receipts for both revenues and expenses. So we use things like Expensify, receipt bank or any of those other credit card type receipt, you know, software technology, you know, solutions. And we’re deploying those so that folks can just simply take a picture of something uploaded. It gets synchronized into your QuickBooks online system or some other software platform that you’re using and it almost becomes a very unintentional way of doing bookkeeping. So in the past, I think the solution was always hire a person, hire another person. But I think if we could take a little bit of time, take a step back and assess the technology solutions available, people would be quite amazed to see how easy bookkeeping can be and how easy it is to organize and digitize a lot of those things.

Tosha Anderson: (10:01)
So I think initially under 100,000 a nonprofit can certainly manage a lot of their own bookkeeping, you know, and perhaps just simply have a CPA that’s reviewing everything for classification, making sure that you know, expenses and revenues are in the right buckets solely for the preparation of the tax return. That can probably be done on an annual basis. Once you get beyond that, you’re probably getting into restricted monies, right? Tracking grants or other special funds for for any particular reason. That’s the point where you really want to consider hiring at least a part-time bookkeeper or continuing to build out those platforms as technology platforms to track those. There’s a couple of really good resources out there on how to properly set up a QuickBooks account specifically for nonprofits. And you can use little custom fields to track the different restricted funds.

Tosha Anderson: (10:58)
So it sounds a little complex as I describe it now, but um, it’s really simple to set up and it’s really simple to track so that you can easily run reports to say how much revenue from this grant, how much expenses and what is our ending balances? Uh, so that’s certainly something that I set up for all of our clients. I could teach other people to set up for their own companies and organizations. It makes it a lot easier than hiring a full-time person. So once we get to about 250,000, you know, certainly probably a part-time or outsourced solution. And frankly, with the right technology deck, the right processes, the right workflow, we can certainly grow. We have clients all the way up to three or 4 million a year that still used us for an outsource solution. So simply putting more money into the problem doesn’t always fix the problem.

Tosha Anderson: (11:45)
That was a big thing I’ve learned in my time of auditing analysis or being on the consulting side, that just by simply adding more people doesn’t necessarily mean it will fix the problem. Uh, the, the example I gave earlier of the audit, you know, the client, they just went under on it after having a couple of years, they had two full-time people. It was costing them about $200,000 a year and things were still not in a good place. Right. So understanding that it’s the workflows, generally the systems, the processes and in the people we have on place. But truly I think a part-time bookkeeper could get you to, you know, frankly about a million dollars or more depending on those words.

Dolph Goldenburg: (12:23)
So interesting. So let, so let me ask you, so you mentioned like you know a part-time bookkeeper can probably get you to, you know, from a quarter million to about a million dollars. One of the things that I often see in addition, like you in addition to those broken systems where people say, well let’s just hire more staff is sometimes as organizations grow, they don’t necessarily have the right staff. So as the organization’s growth from a quarter-million dollars to $1 million, how does it know that either it’s not broad, it’s bookkeeper along with it in terms of training or it’s outgrown its bookkeeper?

Tosha Anderson: (12:55)
That’s a great question. I think understanding their capabilities from how long does it take, are they looking at other solutions to help automate and integrate? How well do they really know the system? Are they certified or get training in the system? That’s going to be a huge component. Remembering that these systems are updated several times a year now, especially these cloud-based systems on a continuous basis. So is this person continuously learning? If you ask for reports, simple reports, give me a, you know, revenue and expense report by a department, are they able to do that or not? Are they able to update and revisit your chart of accounts as you’ve changed your budget, right? Are you making sure that your accounting system is matching how you manage the company internally? If your bookkeeper’s not able to have those conversations with you, it’s probably time to either get them some new training or consider some additional skills and that might mean replacing them with someone else or it might mean bringing someone on in a smaller capacity as an oversight role that you can have some of those additional kinds of financial thought leadership advisory component to your accounting function.

Tosha Anderson: (14:05)
I think any of those options could certainly work for anybody kind of over that million dollars. And frankly that sometimes by a lot of people reach out to us, they have a bookkeeper, they’re great from the day to day transactional, getting the information into the system, but they’re coming up on some of these more complex things and they need someone to help them through that. Part of it is they launched into their next phase.

Dolph Goldenburg: (14:26)
And I’ll share with you, I mean, and I really don’t do a lot of accounting work as you know, but one of the things that I just see with a lot of the clients that I’ve worked with is that the person that’s doing their bookkeeping is probably not the right person to be developing systems and implementing systems. You know, once, once they’re trained in them, they’re able to keep those systems going. But really in terms of saying, okay, you know, we need to implement expense, here’s where we’re going to do, or we need to implement T sheets and here’s how we’re going to do it. Sometimes that’s just beyond their capacity and their ability.

Tosha Anderson: (14:59)
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I often joke that we’re not an accounting firm or an it firm that does accounting because we use so much technology and in an a lot of, I have people on our team that their job is to constantly scour what is new and relevant and updated with respect to technology. And I think it’s a huge disservice to any company, especially nonprofits, to not have someone even at an intern level, quite frankly, to be assessing and evaluating how can we do things a little bit differently. In fact, a lot of the tips of technology that I used, I hired a gentleman out of college who was still in college at the time and he had a really strong interest in technology, but he also understood accounting cause he was an accounting student. So I hired him with, with the sole function of him constantly evaluating what is the best platform specific to this industry that could accommodate things like restricted fun tracking, department tracking, budget tracking, those sorts of things.

Dolph Goldenburg: (16:04)
So, okay, so really I got to stop you there. Cause you cannot, you cannot throw out that bait saying that you hired someone to determine what the best platform is and not tell us what it is. So what is the best platform for that million-dollar organization that needs to be tracked in restricted funds?

Tosha Anderson: (16:19)
No, that’s great. Yeah. So my favorite technology deck, and I have to say in full disclaimer, I have zero financial partnership or I don’t even know if they know I exist with the software companies, but we’ve spent a lot of time research Jeanet. So my favorite technology deck right now, um, is I use QuickBooks online primarily. Almost all of our clients actually come to us with that. We didn’t necessarily recommend it or require it. It’s just affordable and it’s easy to use. I’d like that deck that particular software because oftentimes if you’re going to be looking for a bookkeeper, they’re going to have some sort of experience in that software platform. It makes for an easy transition. I also like it for paying bills, nonprofits generally have to have approvals documented on those bills. Oftentimes they have to have multiple people approved and they need to save the image or the documentation for it, right? So digitizing the actual invoice, bill.com is a software platform that you can simply upload the invoice, your bookkeeper or someone on your team can code, the account, the department, the grant tagged, the appropriate people for approval, including your board members that might be out of town, traveling and no bills get paid until everybody’s approval is.

Dolph Goldenburg: (17:36)
Yeah. And, and if I can, if I can just jump in real quick. I want to talk about both those. One of the things that I love about QuickBooks, I know a lot of people look down their nose at QuickBooks. One of the things that I love about it is that it is so commonly used that almost there’s an integration with almost every other financial HR system will integrate into your QuickBooks so that you don’t have to manually enter it. And that’s one of things I love about QuickBooks, even though I know, I know a lot of accountants look down their nose at it. And, I also want to back up your testimonial about bill.com, at least two of the places where I’ve done interims. We’ve used bill.com and it is phenomenally convenient. Not only does it manage all of the approval processes, but it also cuts the check and sends it for you, which you know, you know, which now means that you do not have a human being in your office that spends a day every week cutting checks and mailing them.

Tosha Anderson: (18:30)
Absolutely right. And that’s one of the reasons why I like QuickBooks because it interfaces and integrates with all of these things. So bill.com is fantastic. I had a client that kept getting, you know, recommendations from the auditors. You’re inconsistent in your approvals and consistent in your documentation for transactions or bill.com it’s completely eliminated that issue. A receipt bank I use for, um, credit cards. I have one client for example, that has 15 different credit cards. They are a recipient of the AmeriCorps program grant. And in order to use to effectively administer that program, you have to have documentation for every single transaction that hits that budget. Well, we were doing an incredibly manual process. They were paying a full time person just to manage all of the credit card transactions and the staff that were using the credit cards, the programs book people, they were uploading the receipts, they were scanning them, they were doing all these different manual transactions. I said, why don’t we just use receipt bank because it allows you to get down at a very granular level. Some of them don’t allow you to get down to a program or a subprogram. A grant or a subgrant receipt bank allows you to dive into each one of those different layers. So we like to use that for receipt bank. And now you’ve essentially eliminated the issue of the accountant having to reproduce all of the manual work that the program folks have already.

Dolph Goldenburg: (19:56)
And so I’m familiar with Expensify, which I assume it’s similar to receipt bank, but are you recommending receipt bank because Expensify will not allow you to go down into those subprogram levels or

Tosha Anderson: (20:08)
That’s exactly right. Yeah, we’d like receipt bank right now because it allows you to get it all those different granular levels so that we can easily reproduce the reports, um, in a very, you know, segmented way. So that for the primary user there’s a couple add on software solutions that we like as well. There is a cash flow forecasting. I could look at this point in time all the way out for 18 months. It’s called float, F, L O A T and you can actually project out what your cash and balance. So at the end of the day, we care a lot about revenue. We care a lot about our expenses. That’s what really the board thinks about, right? As the CEO, you’re worried, am I going to have enough cash and when am I going to run out of cash three months, six months in advance based on these scenarios and assumptions. Presumably your budget, but not always your budget, it becomes irrelevant at some point. Usually, during the year you have to update it with things that you now know based on that information and knowledge. Can we project out when we’re going to have a cash deficit and can we do some proactive fundraising and all of that integrates with QuickBooks. So QuickBooks feeds the actual numbers and it projects it out for 18 months what your cashflow is.

Dolph Goldenburg: (21:25)
So I love that and I am absolutely gonna use that. I am not familiar and I have not used float or even been familiar with it. I’m currently doing an interim with a multimillion-dollar organization and every Friday, this is one of the things that I just require every Friday I get a cash flow projection and I know that someone in the finance office has to sit down and probably spends two or three hours every week to put that cash flow projection form together for me. So when I walked into the office this week, I’m totally going to be like, you all need a look at float and make this a little bit simpler for us all.

Tosha Anderson: (21:58)
Yeah, we’re able to do that for our clients. A lot of our clients like to really get into the nuts and bolts of the accounting and the projections. And they can run different fundraising scenarios. Maybe they want to hire another person, they’re writing grants so they can assume if we get that grant, then that means we have to hire this additional person. At what point does that affect cashflow flow positively or negatively? There’s all different scenarios that we can run in that regard. So of course that’s a lot of the accounting techniques that we use for our clients. But of course we built an entire infrastructure of technology that allows us to be extremely efficient in the work that we’re doing. So I tell clients, you know, perhaps maybe you are paying somebody 15, 20 hours a week, but now using the right technology and holding your internal team responsible for uploading documentation, following these workflows, using these processes instead of 15 or 20 hours a week, we can get it down to five and maybe we can hire a more qualified person to fill an accounting and bookkeeper role. Or we can just save money overall if that’s not something we need. So collectively it’s a really nice solution for everybody.

Dolph Goldenburg: (23:05)
So, so we’ve talked about obviously QuickBooks, we’ve talked about receipt bank, and float. Are there any other technology solutions you’re recommending right now?

Tosha Anderson: (23:18)
Not as it relates to accounting. That pretty much covers the bases. When we get into more complex things like, for example, if you have PayPal that also integrates with QuickBooks, your banking should also integrate with QuickBooks most of the time. All of this data entry that you’re doing from various, donor data databases, I’m trying to think of some of them off the of my head. I’ve got a couple clients that have membership models or they’d rent the book in rent out community spaces, right? All of those different platforms, those eCommerce platforms that allow us to get earned revenue oftentimes integrate really nicely with QuickBooks. So rather than paying someone in a very manual way to enter all that detail and you can set that up to be ported right into your accounting system that completely eliminates and streamlines a lot of that.

Tosha Anderson: (24:12)
We have a church, for example, their online giving platform. We were able to connect with QuickBooks. So rather than entering all of those transactions individually, it just gets data dumped right into the accounting system. So if there’s any software out there, to your point off that you were making earlier with HR sales, you know, especially on the payroll side, any software that you’re using, look and see if QuickBooks is compatible with an in some way. I’m sure that there probably isn’t. That’s one of the reasons why I like that software. They spend a lot of money over there at Intuit making sure that they’re constantly able to integrate with as many things as possible.

Dolph Goldenburg: (24:51)
So another quick question around integrations and, and I run across this all the time. Again, I really don’t do accounting consulting, but I know enough to be able to say to a client, you’re going to get in trouble here. You need to talk to somebody who knows what to do. And so oftentimes I’ll be working with an organization and maybe they’re getting their first federal grant or their first federal pass-through grants. So they may not even realize this federal funding cause it’s coming from their city, but it’s really federal money, and I’ll kind of say: Oh, you know, are you keeping timesheets? And they go, no, we don’t have to keep time sheets. And I, yeah, exactly. We can see each other. I just saw your face. I make that exact same face. And, and I’m like, Hm, you should really talk to whoever your grant officer is because yeah, you, if you get federal money, you do have to have time and effort documentation and you do have to have time sheets. Now is there any type of electronic timesheet system that you recommend as integration with QuickBooks?

Tosha Anderson: (25:44)
I think it depends on the size of the organization. If you are less than 10 employees you could probably, and again it depends on the operation, so uh, I’ve had a head start early head start and they have a shared group of employees and they kind of moved from one classroom to the next. That’s a little bit harder to use and you probably are going to have a hand punch machine or something like that. If you have some social workers that are basically in front of their desk in front of their computer, you could use something like T sheets is really common and really popular. That also integrates nicely with QuickBooks. I’m sure there’s other platforms out there and a more sophisticated way to her payroll processing company, but I would certainly ask them to what degree they can accommodate that. Not every payroll company is created equally and can do that, with relative ease.

Tosha Anderson: (26:34)
So that would certainly be something I would be looking at. But kind of going back to, if you don’t mind, I’d like to just add that I don’t think that that people realize sometimes that when you are getting federal or even state money and you’re going to be audited or you’re going to have a compliance audit, generally what they call those audit programs. So the people that are going to come out and inspect you that information on what they’re going to be looking at is publicly available. And so to your point, if they’re going to be inspecting timesheets, they’re generally going to have that in their audit program that, you know, reviewing certain documentation, discussing certain things. And once you get a contract, I would also look for an audit program. Uh, everything at the federal level I certainly know is available. I’m based here, out of Missouri, same if we get state income tax credit programs and things like that. All those audit programs are available. So when you get those contracts, make sure that you read them and really understand them

Dolph Goldenburg: (27:32)
So I think it’s a really good idea for the executive team. The finance office and whoever’s that is running the program team to be proactive and talk to the grant manager at the funder. Whether that’s the city, the state, the feds, whoever and say, Hey, we know that you’re going to be doing a site visit probably in about a year. Can we get you to do one after we’d been operating for three months and can you go ahead and give us the site visit tool so that we can be performing in accordance with that site visit tool and you know, wow? Well yeah you’re asking to do a little bit of work and you’re going to have to do a little extra work. Cause you’re asking really for two site visits in the first year by getting one in your first, you know after your first three months you correct things early as opposed to getting 13 months in and realizing, Oh we forgot to have you know, time and effort documentation or you know, or oh we are not producing our client files and financial records correctly for this funder.

Tosha Anderson: (28:31)
Absolutely. I think that’s a great idea and if nothing else, if you have a new accountant that’s coming on board, I think it’s a great idea for them to reach out to the billing folks on the other side on those grants relationships and just talking about a conversation, are you getting, are you getting the financials that you need? Are you getting the invoices in the right way? What are some of the issues that have happened in the past? I’ve done that with most of my clients that I’ve known how to contract issues, compliance issues and haven’t necessarily been in great standing with funders in the past. I proactively like to reach out to those funders. It’s a new day. Share with me a little bit more about your struggles and your issues. And I think sometimes the CEO might be surprised a little bit at how that accountant or bookkeeper might be interfacing with the funders. And if there are any issues on those sides. I think we uncovered some, some challenges in the last year with some of those clients that we have in their funders that the CEO just didn’t know.

Dolph Goldenburg: (29:31)
Right, right. Well Tasha, let me say, I gotta leave time for the off the map question, but this has been such a great conversation. I kind of feel like the moral of the story for everybody listening today is that, first of all, use technology to manage your finances. Second of all, to essentially think about getting higher skill level. If fewer hours that leverage that technology well so that you know, maybe you don’t need a full time person managing your money. If you’re a 500,000 or a million or even two or $3 million organization, maybe you really can get by with a part time person and some consulting and really manage your funds well and ended that, that’s the goal. It’s not to increase your headcount. Exactly. So let me ask you, um, and I have to say that you have so perfectly led into Tosha this off the map question because I really believe that there will come a time when most of the things that we do today are going to be obsolete because of artificial intelligence. And so, you know, you’ve already talked about, okay, here are some great apps and programs that can probably eliminate headcount within your organization. So let’s say the year is 20, 30 and now artificial intelligence does all accounting, all you’ve got to do is download the program and it runs everything. So suddenly, Tosha, you’ve got to find something else to do if you can not pursue what has been your life career, which is accounting, what’s your next gig?

Tosha Anderson: (31:03)
Oh wow. If it relates a little bit to what I was doing before, helping to set up the accounting systems to be able to do all that integration, which frankly were not even that far off, I’d say even 20, 25 or less to be in a place where, where you were referring to. But secretly, before, if I, I always said if I lost my company today and, and everything changed, before starting this firm, I actually saw myself as, as potentially being a leader of a nonprofit and maybe a CEO of a nonprofit. I, I’ve been accused of the social worker at heart. I love the mission-based businesses. I love working with those folks. And so I probably find myself back in a leadership role at one nonprofit rather than working with numerous nonprofits.

Dolph Goldenburg: (31:45)
I could totally see you as a nonprofit CEO. I mean, you’re already a CEO because you’re running your own company. But, and let me say just for listeners, this is not an insignificant company. Tosha has, you know, I don’t know the exact headcount, but I think it’s at least a dozen, maybe dozens of accountants working for, you know, who our actual employees and she offers good benefits, you know, so she’s already the CEO of a company. But I love the fact that you’re going to transition into the social sector when accounting is all artificial intelligence. That’s awesome. Tosha, thank you so much. I have really enjoyed our conversation today. I especially appreciate your message of let’s find ways to use technology, to really leverage expertise. So listeners, if you are heard Tosha today and realize that your nonprofit needs a little bit of help in your finance office, whether that’s, Hey, are we doing the right things?

Dolph Goldenburg: (32:38)
Do we have the right skill set or do we have the right technology? Be certain to check out her website, which is thecharitycfo.com. Once again, that’s the charity, cfo.com. Now, Jesse, you’re aware at her website she will be launching a new blog though, which should be sharing articles that are really relevant for all nonprofit executives and board members. I know some folks feel like accounting can be boring and maybe some folks who like we cover accounting issues a little bit too much on this podcast, but if we’re not keeping track of our funds, we’re not going to keep getting funds. So please make sure once that blog launches you go and you subscribe to updates. And finally, I want to let you all know about an amazing offer that Tasha has made for just our listeners. She is willing to offer a free 45-minute strategy session to assess your current situation and offer some recommendations for improvement.

Dolph Goldenburg: (33:37)
So if you found this generic conversation helpful, imagine how helpful actual conversation just you and Tosha is going to be. So you can not miss this offer. I will share with you the URL is a little bit long to read. So we’re going to post that in our show notes and we are going to put that as the very first link in the show notes. We’re also going to obviously link to Tosha’s URL, uh, her businesses URL. And we’re also going to link to the different apps that Tosha mentioned in the podcast today, Please make sure that you reach out and take advantage of that. That is a valuable offer. Tosha, thank you so much for joining us today.

Tosha Anderson: (34:25)
Thanks Dolph. It’s been really great. I, I’ve kind of noticed that accounting sometimes doesn’t get a lot of air time and it doesn’t get a lot of opportunities for me to share. It gets a little bit about accounting, but a lot of hacks that we can do to really make it as painless as possible. So thank you so much for letting me hop on the line today and share a little bit more about what we’ve been doing and how we can help other nonprofits really streamline all of that work for them.

Dolph Goldenburg: (34:47)
Well, well thank you and I’m so thrilled you share the hacks. Thank you

Tosha Anderson: (34:51)
Thank you for having me!

Dolph Goldenburg: (34:53)
So dear listeners, if you’re currently assembling all of the documents for your pre-audit fieldwork cause like you know you maybe you’ve not embraced technology yet and you’re open up those desk drawers and looking for receipts and trying to figure out where you miss filed something, then keep right on looking through your files, running reports and scanning papers because you do not need a worry about writing down those URLs. We will publish them all at our website, successful nonprofits.com so once you’ve got a handle on the audit fieldwork that you’re prepping for right now, this very minute, then go to successful nonprofits.com and get all of Tosha has information. Now we’ll also have a link as I already said to Tosha, generous offer for a 45-minute consultation. Please do take her up on that offer. Now if you enjoyed this episode, it probably means you like accountant and accounting and that means you’re near and dear to my heart and it also means that you should definitely check out episode one 24 with Tiffany couch.

Dolph Goldenburg: (35:52)
She is a forensic accountant who wrote a book about fraud and embezzlement that reads like a true-crime novel. Each chapter is essentially one type of nonprofit for profit or government fraud or embezzlement that she uncovered. Um, and then at the end of it she tells you what type of fraud it is and what internal controls you can have in place that would prevent that fraud. It is a great read. I believe that every single nonprofit treasurer in America should read that book. So also want to let you all know listeners that I’m going to be speaking later this month at the center link leadership summit and I’ve asked them for permission to record and release my presentations as a podcast. And one of my two presentations is going to be how to survive a financial meltdown within your organization. I often have organizations that reach out to me and say, Oh my gosh, we think we can’t make payroll on a week.

Dolph Goldenburg: (36:51)
Or you know, our largest funder just told us we’re not going to get money any more money after three months. What should we do? And so this presentation is going to focus on that. I’m looking forward to being able to record it along with the audiences Q and a and sharing it with you as a podcast episode in the coming weeks. Now, I say this every single episode, but please, if you have not already subscribed, rated and reviewed the podcast, please go online and do that. It helps other listeners find out about the podcast. Well, dear listeners, that is our show for the week. I hope you have gained some insight to help your nonprofit thrive in a competitive environment.

DISCLAIMER: (37:31)
I am not an accountant or attorney and neither I nor the Goldenburg Group group provides tax, legal, or accounting advice. This material has been provided for informational purposes only, is not intended to provide and should not be relied on for tax, legal, or accounting advice. Always consult a qualified licensed professional about such matters.