Although your grant proposal may have all the right research and all the right foundation buzz words, a lack of financial information can seriously weaken, even undercut all your great work as a grant writer. The role of solid financials is so great to your eventual success in winning grants that some grant writers refuse to even work with non-profits unless they have stellar financial statements already in place.
As a rough and ready consulting firm, however, Drew & Associates takes a different approach. In particular, we focus on helping non-profits improve their record keeping, deliver reasonable financial statements, and secure low cost audits or even lower cost accountant compilations or reviews.
In our experience, most foundations know that a genuine audit including testing of your financial records by a competent CPA is just too expensive to justify. In my case, I have often told non-profit leaders that Trish and I would gladly donate to the charity if we were confident the money would go into a high quality audit.
Nevertheless, all the funders really want to see - in the end - is something that looks like an audited financial statement.
In other words, they want you to keep your records in Quickbooks or some other financial accounting software and then produce for them a Statement of Activities which basically shows your income and expenses for the previous calendar or fiscal year and a Statement of Financial Position which shows the overall strength of your charity by reporting your assets and liabilities. I always thought it was odd that the Statement of Financial Position also reports what happens when you add your net assets and liabilities together.
I always thought that the only really important number was your net assets - or your charity's actual net worth. Instead, I now understand that adding net assets and liabilities together shows the funder how large your organization is in general.
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