Do you understand the costs of your initiatives?

Understanding the costs of running your organization is essential to success, but completing standard financial reports does not give you the cost information you need to make informed decisions. Grant accounting might help you appropriately manage your grant finances, but it does not articulate revenue generation costs. IRS accounting might outline your functional expenses, but it will not tell you how much it actually costs to run a particular program or site. In our Financial Analysis Service Grant, our team will help you define the costs associated with your important initiatives such as programs, expansion, or revenue generation.

In our Financial Analysis project, our team works with you to identify and frame the cost initiatives you need to define. The team does an in-depth examination of your current financial reports and accounting, teasing out cost factors relevant to those initiatives. The team then prepares a comprehensive report of costs that clearly lays out for you the full costs of taking on a particular initiative.

The impact of each project varies, but a Financial Analysis Service Grant is best suited to a nonprofit that wants to:

• Better understand the costs associated with running a particular program
• Make a decision about expansion such as whether to offer services in a new city or scale back services due to cost considerations
• Build a plan for more targeted revenue generation by understanding the costs of generating revenue across different streams

• Investigation of the full cost structure around a program, site, or revenue stream
• Development of report that lays out costs of an important initiative

*Note: does not include development or update of a strategic plan.*

• In-depth analysis of current financials and accounting
• Report that clearly lays out the cost of an important initiative

Your Taproot Foundation Financial Analysis team will be staffed by finance, accounting and strategy experts who have made a personal commitment to strengthening the nonprofit sector. Your team will include:

• Account Director
• Project Manager
• Financial Consultant
• (2) Financial Analysts

Our Financial Analysis Service Grant is most likely to be successful under certain circumstances. We recommend you apply if your organization has:

• An Executive Director and Board of Directors strongly committed to this project
• Staff that can invest the necessary time to make the project succeed:
  • Executive Director: 10-15 hours total
  • Finance Director: 15-20 hours total
  • Selected Managers: 5 hours total
  • Day-to-Day Contact: 3-5 hours each week
  • Board of Directors Representative: 5-10 hours total

We also ask that your organization meet at least one of the following criteria:

• Locations in two or more cities
• Running two or more programs
• Two or more funding streams (streams constituting at least 10% of total funding)

If this project appears appropriate for your organization, please review our grant process and criteria, and then apply.

• Competitor/Collaborator Analysis
• Strategic Planning Preparation
• Strategic Scorecard