Monthly bookkeeping built for Canadian charities and not-for-profits

What a month actually looks like

Outsourced bookkeeping is often sold as an outcome without anyone describing the work. Here is the sequence we run every month, in order. It is the same sequence whether the organization is a $200,000 community group or a $3M multi-program charity — what changes is the volume, not the steps.

• Reconcile every account. Bank, credit card, investment, and every donation or payment platform. An account that is not reconciled is not evidence of anything.
• Clear the clearing accounts. Platform payouts in transit, payroll between the run and the withdrawal. Each one should net to a known, explainable balance. A clearing account that keeps growing means one side of a transaction is not being recorded.
• Record donations and grants received, coded to the right fund and reconciled against the donor CRM or fundraising platform for the period.
• Post payroll and confirm remittances were actually made, not just calculated.
• Review fund and program allocations. Every transaction that belongs to a restricted fund or a specific program is tagged, so the fund-level and program-level reports come out of the ledger rather than a spreadsheet.
• Verify restricted fund balances against the grant and contribution schedules, so each restricted balance is defensible against the agreement behind it.
• Prepare the board package and flag anything the treasurer should be ready to explain before the meeting.

Onboarding: the first 30 days

Most of the value — and most of the risk — sits in setup rather than in the recurring monthly work. A file that is structured correctly stays easy; a file that is not gets more expensive every month it runs.

Our onboarding runs in three stages:

• Week 1 — assess. We review the existing file, the prior-year financial statements, the last T3010 or T1044, the chart of accounts, and every funding agreement that carries a restriction. The output is a written list of what has to change and what it will take.
• Weeks 2–3 — structure. Chart of accounts rebuilt or restructured on ASNPO-aligned lines, fund and program dimensions established, opening balances agreed, integrations connected and tested, and access and approval roles set.
• Week 4 — first close. We run a full close on the new structure and reconcile the output against the prior period, so any structural problem surfaces immediately rather than at year-end.

How restricted funds get set up

This is the part general-purpose bookkeeping usually gets wrong, and it is the reason a charity's books need someone who has done charity work before.

Funds are tracked as a dimension layered on a single set of natural accounts — classes or locations in QuickBooks Online, dimensions in Sage Intacct — rather than by duplicating the whole expense list under each fund. Duplicating multiplies the account count, makes consolidated reporting harder, and increases miscoding. One expense account, tagged by fund and by program, produces the consolidated view and the fund-level view from the same data.

Alongside that, your accounting policy for restricted contributions has to be chosen and then applied consistently. ASNPO permits the deferral method and the restricted fund method, and the ledger has to carry enough restriction-level detail to support whichever one your CPA has settled on, plus the financial statements and any funding agreements. We set that up at onboarding rather than discovering the mismatch during an audit.

Board-designated reserves are tracked separately from externally restricted funds, because they are not the same thing: a board designation is an internal decision the board can reverse, while an external restriction is imposed by the donor or funder and survives the gift.

What we need from you

Engagements go well or badly largely on the basis of these six things arriving on time:

• Read-only bank and credit card access, and access to the donation platform or CRM.
• Prior-year financial statements and the most recent T3010 or T1044.
• The current chart of accounts and, if there is one, the existing accounting file.
• Every funding agreement that carries a restriction, reporting obligation, or audit requirement.
• A named contact with authority to approve coding questions, and a documented approval process for payments.
• Source documents delivered on an agreed schedule rather than in a year-end box.

The software stack

We work in QuickBooks Online for most small and mid-sized charities and Sage Intacct for larger or multi-entity organizations, and we will tell you honestly which one your requirements point to rather than defaulting to whichever is easier for us.

Neither product does fund accounting simply by being installed. QuickBooks Online has no native fund accounting — fund balances are carried through classes or locations and the reports have to be built. Sage Intacct has native fund accounting and a dimensions architecture, at substantially higher licensing and implementation cost. The configuration is the work in either case.

If you already have a file we can generally work in it. If the structure will not support fund reporting, we will say so and scope the restructuring separately rather than quietly working around it every month.

What it costs, by organization profile

Fixed monthly fees, not hourly billing, so the invoice does not punish you for asking questions. Starting prices; final pricing is confirmed on the discovery call once scope is understood.

• Essentials — from $500/month. Charities under roughly $500K annual revenue with a simple fund structure and a volunteer treasurer. Monthly bookkeeping and coding, reconciliations, donation receipting reconciliation, month-end statements for treasurer review, annual T3010 preparation and filing, and a year-end file organized for the external accountant.
• Growth — from $1,000/month. Mid-size charities and NPOs from roughly $500K to $2M, multi-fund and board-governed. Everything in Essentials plus fund accounting setup with restricted, unrestricted and program-level segmentation, the monthly board pack, treasurer Q&A and finance committee preparation, audit or review engagement preparation, a quarterly financial review call, and funder report templates.
• Enterprise — from $2,000/month. Organizations over $2M, multi-entity, or with complex funder reporting or a capital campaign. Everything in Growth plus Sage Intacct or multi-entity QBO architecture, multi-currency and multi-entity consolidation, fractional CFO hours, custom funder reporting, capital campaign accounting, and reserve policy design and monitoring.
• Catch-up work is quoted separately. If the file is behind, the effort depends on how many periods are open and how much reconstruction is needed. We would rather quote that honestly up front than fold it into a monthly rate that has to change three months in.

What this engagement is not

Two boundaries worth stating plainly, because they protect you as much as us.

We do not perform audit or review engagements for our own bookkeeping clients. Preparing the file and providing assurance on the file are separate roles, and combining them would compromise the independence your board and funders are relying on. We prepare the working-paper file so your independent auditor or reviewer can work efficiently — see audit and year-end preparation.

We do not replace the treasurer or the board. The bookkeeping, reconciliation, and reporting work is ours. Financial governance, approvals, and oversight remain with the treasurer and the board, and the division is documented in the engagement letter and your board delegations. If you are figuring out where that line should sit, what a charity treasurer actually does is a useful starting point.