Simple Finance Management for Community Organizations

The Struggle Is Real

Over the years, I’ve had the chance to work with a fair number of community groups. They’ve had different goals, different histories, different obstacles to overcome, different reasons to bring me in. But they’ve pretty much all agreed on one thing: managing money is hard, and if you don’t take care of it you get into trouble real fast.

Over time, I’ve noticed a lot of the same troubles repeat: How much money do we even have? Where did it come from and what are we allowed to do with it? How much is budgeted for what purposes? Who’s allowed to approve spending for what? What purchases have we already committed to make, and how much money needs to be set aside for those? Did we ever get around to reimbursing folks who paid expenses out of pocket?

If you’re a well-resourced nonprofit, most likely you’ve got a finance team to keep this all straight. Perversely, if you’re a cash-strapped community group doing your best to spend every dime wisely – there’s a pretty good chance you’ve been left to figure it out on your own.

After working with a number of groups to set up basic financial procedures, I’ve realized there are a few factors more or less everyone needs to track, without regard to what work you’re doing:

How much money do you have?
Where did your money come from, and what restrictions apply to it? (e.g., it was given to you for a specific purpose)?
What purposes is that money is budgeted for, in what amounts?
Who’s allowed to approve spending out of what parts of the budget?
How much money have you spent?
How much money have you already committed to specific future expenses?

If you’ve got a system to keep this all straight, it won’t make financial management “easy”, but at the very least you’ll be able to move forward confidently without worrying about accidentally spending the same dollar twice.

With all that in mind, I’ve put together a Simple Financial Tracking Template for Community Organizations, and am making it freely available to whoever might find it useful.

What The Template Does

The template is an Excel workbook with five interconnected tabs, tracking and reconciling five key aspects of an organization’s financial management:

Income: What money have we brought in?
Revenue Accounts: How are we categorizing our money, and how much is in each account?
Budget Lines: What purposes are we allocating money to, from what accounts, in what amounts?
Commitments: What money have we committed to spend, but not yet spent, from what budgets?
Expenses: What money have we actually spent, on what, from what budgets?

Each file is an XLSX document. It is Excel-native, but can be imported into Google Sheets or other web-based office suites. The spreadsheet includes its own documentation, including an About tab and comments built into each individual tab.

Downloads

*A Few Notes and Disclaimers

This template is not a comprehensive financial planning system, nor is it designed to assist with legal, tax, accounting, or other compliance. It is offered as-is with no warranty, including any implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. If you’re aware of a better tool to meet your needs: Use it!

The Simple Financial Tracking Template for Community Organizations is freely available under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which allows you to copy, share, and adapt the materials as long as you credit the original author (Z.A. Withers LLC).