Category: Nonprofit
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Should a small charity file 990N or 99EZ? It might depend on your goals
An accountant’s general rule is to provide as little information on a required filing as the law requires. But the opposite may be true for small charities. I’d love to hear your experience.
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Reflecting on the 1099 filing season
IRS Form 1099 procedures are not overly complicated either in theory or in practice but are perhaps the most widely misunderstood topic in US taxation today. Reading online comments and suggestions and many stories of misapplication, it is clear that the government has much work ahead before it can effectively utilize business reporters’ information returns…
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Best Practices for Setting up an Accounting System for a Charity or Other Nonprofit Organization
There is no single right way or wrong way to set up an accounting system for a nonprofit organization. Every method has its pros and cons. Yet small new nonprofits may find a that simple clear list of best practice recommendations is useful to save time and money and to avoid learning ‘the hard way’.…
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Donation acknowledgment letters from charities
This is the time of year that many smaller charities send donation acknowledgement letters to contributors. IRS requires these letters as documentation of the contributions. It seems that larger charities send these at the time the donation is made while some smaller charities with fewer donor management capabilities wait until year end. This post is…
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Audits are expensive, even for small charities!
Update for 2022: Our State of New Jersey recently raised the minimum size requirement for nonprofit audits to $1,000,000 gross receipts. These bullet point comments are meant to introduce the topic of costs associated with financial statement audits of small charities. Financial statement audits are not the only type of audit undertaken by small charities…
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Millville CPA Announces $50,000 in Free Accounting Support to Community
Tony Novak CPA is pleased to announce exciting changes to nonprofit and micro-business accounting services for 2022. We all know that 2021 was a year that triggered us to reevaluate our internal business practices and adapt to cope with the new realities of the business world. This past year our firm was overwhelmed with the…
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Due dilligence and compliance checklist of nonprofit organizations
When associating with a nonprofit organization an accountant, attorney, prospective board member, partner of major business associate should perform a due diligence check of the organization. Additionally, management should undertake a periodic review occasionally just to check to ensure that the organization’s records are up to date. This checklist is prepared to help make that…
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Management disfunction of a nonprofit organization: what it means to the external accountant
Two years ago I was the external accountant in a nonprofit organization (a church) with an internal conflict between the President and the Treasurer. My engagement specified that I was to report to the Treasurer. Yet the President had the power to end my contract. The predictable outcome was for either party to blame the…
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Compensation for nonprofit board members
ESG activists like myself have long pushed for improvement in leadership of nonprofit organizations. For reasons expounded by authors elsewhere and not retreated in this blog post, we recognize that one way to move toward this goal is to diversify the makeup of nonprofit boards. Nonprofit boards tend to be made up of upper middle…