The Spring Forward Podcast
The Spring Forward Podcast, formerly focused on general organizational excellence, has evolved to become your go-to resource for all things nonprofit. Host Spring Richardson Perry brings her expertise to guide listeners through the intricacies of nonprofit management, offering insights, strategies, and inspiring stories to help organizations thrive and maximize their impact in the community.
The Spring Forward Podcast
Financial Storytelling for Nonprofit Success
Financial storytelling might be the missing piece in your nonprofit's fundraising strategy. Join host Spring Richardson Perry as she and guest Neil Shah explore how financial story telling can help organizations make strategic decisions aligned with their mission. Neil brings two decades of nonprofit financial expertise to the discussion.
Here are some of the key takeaways for this episode:
• Difference between bookkeepers and CFOs
• How to analyze financial data to uncover trends and potential issues
• Creating visual representations of financial information for effective communication
• Using AI tools like ChatGPT to analyze nonprofit financial data
• Understanding one-time revenues vs recurring income for accurate forecasting
• Cash flow management techniques for small and growing nonprofits
• Strategic approaches to hiring based on projected funding
• Resources for nonprofits that cannot afford full-time financial leadership
Remember that nonprofits are businesses too. Your financial story matters and helps secure funding that sustains your mission! Connect with Neil Shah on LinkedIn.
Hey, nonprofit friends, welcome to the Spring Forward podcast, where we talk about all things nonprofit, from board discord to grant writing and strategic planning tips. If you're an executive director, nonprofit board member or just someone heavily involved in the nonprofit sector, then this is the podcast for you. Let's spring forward into excellence. Welcome, welcome everyone to another episode of the Spring Forward podcast. I'm your host, spring Richardson Perry, and today I am super excited to come to you guys and talk to you about non-profit financial health and to help us talk about this very important topic. Today I have neil shah. He has spent the past two decades serving as an outsourced or in-house chief financial officer for non-profit organizations all across the us, and their annual budgets range from a few million to almost half a billion dollars in annual revenue, from government grants to philanthropic revenue. But I am super excited to have this conversation with him today. He has a wealth of knowledge, a bunch of experience, and so I'm just excited to lift this topic up. So thank you so much for being here, neil Welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you, spring, so excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. I always kind of start, I always kind of like to start out with you telling everyone just a little bit about yourself and what you do, and so tell us a little bit about that, Neil.
Speaker 2:Yeah, neil, yeah, absolutely. So I've been like you said. I've been working with nonprofit organizations exclusively for almost 20 years. The majority of my career I've been both a consultant, like an outsourced you know, fractional CFO, but also an in-house CFO as well.
Speaker 2:I kind of fell into the nonprofit space about 20 years ago.
Speaker 2:I was a tech entrepreneur, a failed tech entrepreneur, uh, and and kind of just found the nonprofit world, uh accidentally, quite honestly, and didn't think it was a a permanent road by by any means.
Speaker 2:I thought it was a temporary pit stop, uh, and I just fell in love with working with nonprofit organizations, especially the, the public charter schools that I was working with uh in los angeles, um, and I've just been doing that kind of work since. You know, I had a company that did that back office services for charter schools for a while and I became in-house CFO for education nonprofits. And now I'm providing these interim CFO services where I'm coming into an organization that has where their CFO has just recently left and I'm coming in kind of to stabilize the organization until they find the next CFO, but also to improve the processes, the systems and the culture of the finance team such that we prepare the org to set up the next permanent CFO in a much more stronger place, and I'm finding that work to be so exciting because it's needed. There's an opportunity to make improvements over a certain amount of time, and then you're on to the next challenge, and I've always found that to be really, really exciting.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's wonderful, Neil. Thank you so much, and I want to say I would not call you a failed tech entrepreneur, right? I don't think I think all disappointments lead to your next success. It was by no coincidence that you fell into the nonprofit world, right, and so I love to hear it, love to hear it. But I want to kind of jump into this really quickly, because you sort of described exactly what it is that you do, and I want to talk about the difference, right, what a CFO does, and the difference between them and a bookkeeper, because those are two very different roles, but I don't think people really understand the difference. So can you explain that for us?
Speaker 2:That's a great. It's a great example. So with bookkeeping, it's ensuring that the financial operations are continuing like in any organization, whether it be a nonprofit organization or a retail shop. You have bills to pay, you've got invoices to send out, you've got payroll to run, you have a bank statement that you need to ensure there's money in and that it's reconciled, that you understand all the transactions. So the bookkeeper is the holder of all that financial data and ensures that the transactions are occurring appropriately, that they're being accounted for and that you can be able to put that information into a financial software. It's something as basic, as simple as QuickBooks even to be able to ensure that you understand how much money has been brought in over the course of the month, how much money has gone out, what is an income versus what's your cash balance all of that financial data for the financial operations. It's necessary for that tax to be completed in any organization and ideally you have somebody as an accounts payable clerk or a bookkeeper that is doing that work on a day-to-day basis, either part-time or full-time. For your nonprofit organization.
Speaker 2:A CFO brings a different lens to it, so the CFO is able to take that information and make sense of the data and so to be able to explain you know what is happening with the organization financially are we losing money or are we in a profitable state? What is our, what is our trend? You know. So how much money did we make last year this month versus this year, this month, to be able to compare you know. So I did this. I brought in this much revenue from grants in February of 2024. And this is how much I brought in February 2025. So I understand the difference and I can start to, when I start to see that difference, I can start to blend and create a story as to what is the reasoning behind that, so that we can use that to analyze what's working, what's not working, that the CFO can also look forward, looking as well, and to be able to take the data that's there from the bookkeeper that's in the accounting system and say, well, it looks like last year we did this much. We did this much in total revenues, we did this much in total expenses. This year, based on that, this is what I believe we will do this year, and it's based on the fact that we believe that there'll be more government grants available or that we're going to push harder to raise more money this year or that. You know we raised our our personnel expense by three percent because we gave everybody a raise in the organization. So we know our costs of personnel are going up by three percent.
Speaker 2:We need to know how much revenue we need to be able to bring in, and so we're going to budget for that, we're going to forecast for that and then during the year we're going to track against that as well. So it's it's using the data that the bookkeeper has and creating a story behind it. Um, both for an analytical purpose, but also to be able to help everyone understand the dynamics of the organization on a financial basis, so that that, whether it be the executive director or the ceo of the organization, it could be the board of the organization, it could be funders. Funders want to know your financial story as well, like what's working, what's not working? Are you going to be sustainable going forward? Am I funding a non-profit that's going to be here five years from now? Right? Donors want to know this um and that cfo can help, uh, put a narrative and understanding behind those financials before being behind the um, the, the data that was brought in from the bookkeeper and helped explain that to the the various stakeholders and parties oh, I love, love that.
Speaker 1:That was a very clear distinction of what bookkeepers do and what CFOs do. And I want to kind of focus on something that you said here when you talk about telling the financial story, right, because that is super important when it comes to getting more money going after funders, grants, just different things, getting donations, being able to tell the story of how your money is working. And so what have you found to be impactful for nonprofits in telling their financial story? How can they do that in a way that is going to bring attention to the impact that they have and going to bring in those major donations, those big funders, those government grants? What's been your experience with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. So we take the data and we start to build that narrative. So to understand where we're going, we need to understand first where we are and also, most importantly, where we've come from. So the past, the past, present and future. So a lot of times I'll come into an organization and I'll look at their most recent financial history. So, depending on how long the organization has been there, you know you might have two or three years of financial data, or you might have five, or you might have 10. So it depends on the length of time, but let's use five as an example. So I'll look at the last five years of financial statements and you can pull that from your accounting software, you can pull that from your financial audit any of that data and I'll look at all of the various revenues that have come into the organization. So that might be, you know, if you're government funded, that's, your government grants, or it could be just program, philanthropic donations and fundraising. It could be any earned services or earned revenues that you are selling services for, all of your operational type of revenue, and I'll look at all of those and I'll list it out as operational income.
Speaker 2:Then I'll look at everything that affects the business on an expense side. So what are your operational expenses? Things like your personnel, consultants that you're hiring, your rent facilities costs, securities costs, if there's any building expenses, things like that. If you provide food services, if you're an education nonprofit that has food services for children, all of those operational expenses and I'll look at what is the difference between those two. So operational expenses income minus operational expenses equals operation surplus or deficit. So is that a positive number or is that a negative number? And what's that been that number every single year? Then I'll look at some of the non-operating things you know. So we hear terms like depreciation, um, or interest expense, right, um. These are things that still affect the business. They don't affect it on an operational basis, um. But I'll put that kind of below the line as well and I'll come up with what our total net income is in an organization.
Speaker 2:But then, most importantly, what I'll try to do is I'll list out below what were the one-time events that occurred over the last five years that we received either by revenue or expenses that can sometimes mask the financial performance of an organization. So a lot of us know, with COVID, over the last five years, education nonprofits got COVID response dollars. A lot of nonprofits got PPP forgiveness, so they applied for a PPP loan and then got forgiveness of that. These are all one-time events, right, so they don't occur in the future. They're affecting it at the moment. Sometimes a nonprofit might sell a piece of property and get a one-time revenue gain of something. It affects that for the year, but it's not something that you can depend on in the future.
Speaker 2:And then I'll start to look at all of that and I'll start to form a thesis as to like it seems like over the last five years our personnel line is increasing faster than our revenue line, our total revenue line, or it seems like the amount of consultants keeps growing every single year and they're not growing at the same rate of our government grants, let's say. And so I have a thesis behind it. I'll take all that data, I'll put it all into Excel or Google Sheets it's all free services and I'll use another free service. I'll put all that data into ChatGPT and I'll ask it to say analyze this data for me. I am a nonprofit with $3 million of annual revenue and these are my financials for the last five years and I believe it seems that my personnel expenses are growing faster than my government grants. I believe that there's these one-time events that were masking the performance. It seems like last year my finances looked really good, but is that because, on an operating basis, I'm bringing in more money than I'm spending, or did this one-time PPP forgiveness kind of mask that? And so I'll ask it to analyze that data for me. And it's really for me to confirm that thesis. So I had a thesis and now ChatGPT will do the work to confirm or not to confirm my thesis and it'll give me the data. So instead of me having to manually calculate the growth rates and all of that, chatgpt can do that for me. And more times than not, chatgp confirms my thesis that personnel expenses have been growing by 5% every single year the last five years, but your revenue has only been growing by 1% every single year, and that's the reason why you're losing money. So I kind of felt that way, I kind of knew what it was. And then ChatGP creates that story for me, Luke Gromen, I can take that data then and I can start to analyze it and dig in a little further if I need to, a little bit deeper if I need to, and then it's the storytelling, the true storytelling aspect of it. And so I will take that information and I'll create a slide deck and I'll have great visuals and very little text, because you don't want to throw too much text onto that type of presentation, you don't want to put too many numbers, you don't want to screenshot your entire spreadsheet of, you know, 8,000 numbers onto 10 different slides, but you know you want to take the data that is given to you in the analysis, create some basic charts. You can use this, you can do this in Excel, you can do this on Google sheets, like just line charts or column charts or bar charts to kind of help tell the story of what's happening here.
Speaker 2:In other organizations I've seen that, you know, uh, over the last five years the enrollment of of a school was going down, um, but the numbers that on his numbers still look like they were, they were good. So, like every year when we looked at the audit, uh, or when the organization looked at their audit, their financials, they look strong, right, they had a strong net income. But then when you pull out these one-time dollars that they're they were getting and you look out into the future, they're not going to get those one-time dollars anymore, right, but their enrollment is still headed in this trend down. So that's the reasoning why. And so now, next year and the year after, the year after, they're not going to have these one-time dollars, but their enrollment is going to continue. So the problem is the enrollment. Right, but we didn't really focus on that too much because we saw the numbers and the numbers looked all good on a total basis.
Speaker 2:Or it might be that you know, our union contract mandates a 3% increase every single year for our personnel, and so that's been growing every single year. But our government revenue has been declining like this, and so I can show that on a chart that you know. Expenses are going up this way and government grants are going down this way, and that's a challenge, because by two years from now it's going to cross, and we've got to be able to mitigate this problem right now. What is the reasoning why our government grants keep going down? Or are there other things that we can do to mitigate our personnel expenses and bring that down?
Speaker 2:But you bring the data to life with financial storytelling. It's not just a bunch of numbers, it's not a bunch of percentages. That's the basis of it, that's the foundation, but then you've got to be able to come out and be able to show it visually and explain it visually, especially to people that are not finance experts right, a lot of the members of your board are not going to be a finance expert, but you help, you're helping them understand that story with visuals, with very little text, but just giving them like. This is the situation, this is where we're coming from, this is where we are today and this is where we're going.
Speaker 1:I love how passionate you are about this, neil, like you have described this so very well. So many people are scared of numbers, like they see numbers and they just immediately freeze and they're like I don't know, I can't deal with this. Bring somebody in to deal with these numbers. It's like, whatever they need to do, just let them do it. And I love how you've described this, because it is important to know exactly what's going on in your organization and sometimes people don't understand. They see numbers. Oh, last year we had a million dollar budget. This year we have one hundred and five million dollar budget, and so we got five million dollars more. Or you know whatever. We had one hundred million dollars. This year we got one hundred and five million. We got five million more. But is that trend going to continue?
Speaker 1:Where did that extra five million come from Is it a one time thing?
Speaker 1:Is it your, your earned income, where you're actually earning this and so you can expect to see that, over time, those increases. What is causing that? Because I'm also the treasurer of a board that I sit on, and so these are the things that I'm looking at, that I'm doing, and I will tell you, it's probably not as detailed as what you do, but also our budget isn't as large as what you've encountered either, and so that makes a difference as well, and that's one of the things that I'm thinking about too is, you know, in the things that you're explaining, that you're describing working with the different, you know, education groups, the charter managements or the education nonprofits, whatever they may be, they typically have these larger budgets, but what happens for that smaller nonprofit, who may not necessarily be able to invest in a CFO, but they still want to be able to maintain their financial health? What do they do? How can they do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I could definitely understand a smaller nonprofit with a $3, $5 million budget $1 million budget not being able to hire a full-time CFO. You wouldn't, I wouldn't advise any organization to want to do that. The dollars have to go to the program, right. And we're building and we're growing as an organization and at one point, hopefully, the organization is large enough to be able to afford a full-time cfo. Um, so there are a lot of opportunities, one being, um, uh, outsourced cfos, fractional cfos, you know. So you get that, the value of a cfo, a full-time cfo, but, like you know, at a certain fractional piece. So somebody's coming in for five or ten hours a week or even five or ten hours a month to look at some of this information.
Speaker 2:But on a basic level, it's important for us to understand that nonprofits are businesses, and so some folks say like no, we're not businesses. We're businesses, we're not for-profit businesses. But we still have to have cash in the bank. We still have to ensure that our revenues most times exceed our expenses, but we're not doing it for shareholder value, right. We're not trying to increase our earnings per share, right. We are trying to increase the impact for the community, right. But we have to first understand that we're a business. So in that business we've got to have a good accounting of money. So we have to make sure somebody the bookkeeper, whoever that is make sure that we're paying bills on time, that we're accounting for it, that we are making sure that money's in the bank, that we're managing all that. So that's forefront, to make sure that that process is strong. And you can get an outsourced bookkeeper. You can get a part-time bookkeeper if that's the need, and that's the case. If we can't hire a full-time CFO, of course, and even if we can hire a part-time CFO, then I would recommend that the CEO or the executive director educate themselves a little bit on how this works. And so you know you can do anything from YouTube courses or YouTube videos to just asking chat to the PT.
Speaker 2:Hey, I'm an executive director with a $2 million budget every single year. I know nothing about finance. What do I need to do to understand the basics of my balance sheet in my income statement? Right, you know those terror words balance sheet, right, income statement. But these are still important documents. We still have to be able to understand them and we got to be able to expand them, because every organization, whether you have only $100,000 in annual revenue or $100 million in annual revenue. You have a balance sheet and you have a P&L profit and loss and income statement. You have a statement of cash flows and QuickBooks and things like this you know that are very, very inexpensive can generate these reports for you, but you have to be able to explain them right. You got to be able to talk through them and so a lot of times I speak about on LinkedIn, about you know, tips for CEOs on how they can read a balance sheet, how they can explain a balance sheet. You've got to educate yourself a little bit.
Speaker 2:But beyond that, the story telling aspect is also something that I think the executive director, the CEO, can do on their own as well. If you just take the data and you can just take your last five years of audits because pretty much every nonprofit gets some type of audit generally or just the historical information in quote books export that data and just throw it all into AI and say, hey, analyze this for me, tell me what's going on. This is my organization. This is the last five years of data and you don't have to break it down by operating and expenses and income if you don't want to, but just take the data, eliminate your name from the report so the chat sheet doesn't know the name of your organization. But I'm an executive director of this organization and this is the last five years of financial statements. This is my profit and loss for the last five years. This is my balance sheet. Analyze this for me. Tell me what's going on. Why are we losing money?
Speaker 2:At minimum, you can do that and with a few iterations, you're going to start to educate yourself and you're going to start to learn a little bit. And then it's also important to have people like you that sit on a treasure on the board, so leaning on your board to help you with that. So if you have a finance person on your board leaning on your board to help you with that, so if you have a finance person on your board ensuring a lot of most nonprofits, generally their treasurer has some level of financial acumen. It's great if they're in a finance job, but even if they have a basic understanding, I think it's really, really important and lean on them and educate yourself and educate and learn from them as well, and that's a resource that's there to support you.
Speaker 2:That is a volunteer position and they can help you as well, so that there's so many opportunities to be out to learn and to not be able to be in a position where, like I can't afford a CFO, so I can't do this analysis. You have to do the analysis. The analysis, the function is important, but how you get there can be different. If you can afford a great CFO, great. But if you have to do it yourself, then do it yourself, right and so that. But it's important to have somebody looking at that and you as the executive director, the CEO of the organization, are ultimately responsible for this information anyway. So it's better to educate yourself to be able to learn how to do this and be able to explain the financial condition of your organization.
Speaker 1:I love that. I love how you incorporated AI into this right, because it seems like people are so afraid of AI and they're thinking like, oh, ai is going to take all of our jobs. Well, no, because I still. You still had to create the Excel spreadsheet. You still had to look at the numbers that were going in and out. You still had to actually create the report to put into the AI platform.
Speaker 2:And so.
Speaker 1:I just I love how you're utilizing the resources that are available to you and also that you're holding these CEOs accountable, right, and these executive directors accountable, because it's like you know, that's no excuse if you don't have a CFO or some sort of financial person who does forecasting or something like that. There's no excuse for you not to understand your financials and what it looks like and what's going on. So I just love how you, how you describe that, and just your knowledge is so, so interesting to me.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Because numbers fascinate me, and so it's never been something that I've been afraid of. I used to be a math teacher.
Speaker 1:So, it's fun to me to look at these things like, oh wait, well, this doesn't really make sense, Because if we take this out, then this shows our true budget, right with those one-time things. Right, and this shows our true budget, right With those one-time things. And I think that's what really kills it for some people, because they're looking at the whole of it to say, well, our budget was, you know? I don't know what happened. Our budget was 5 million last year, but now we're down to three and a half. And what happened?
Speaker 1:Where'd the money go and what did y'all do and who spent all this money and what?
Speaker 1:did y'all do and who spent all this money, and it's like let's take a closer look and see what actually happened.
Speaker 1:But then also, sometimes I think people jump the gun because, just like you were saying earlier, as you were describing payroll expenses and you just gave an example of, say, your union contract which, by the way, guys, you can tell if you didn't know he's a true Chicago and just by that, just just by that reference there.
Speaker 1:But, um, you know you talked about the payroll expenses going up, because you know your union contract um dictates that it has to be, you know, 3% more or whatever, but your revenue, just your baseline revenue, is only increasing by 1%, but payroll expenses are increasing by 3%. So that's really important for you to understand how that works. Because if it keeps increasing at that rate, where you have 3% in payroll costs but 1% in actual revenue costs, the increases like you're going to bottom out. And if you don't find a way to fix that gap, to fill that gap with revenue from either recurring grants or you get some donors, which is probably going to be your best bet is to find some major donors who can fill that gap for you, there's no way that you're going to be able to keep up and have the organization to be sustainable, and then you're kind of like going to be on this hamster wheel and so-.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. You nailed it, because that's the story you want to be able to tell that donor so you can help tell that, tell that donor that you know. Look at, look at the last five years of our personnel expenses and this is what we're tracking going forward and our government grants, as you know, cannot afford our, our full program and you can see the gap that is created next year and this is the gap that we need to fundraise for and this is where your dollars are going to be so supportive in that and you can sell them the fact that it could be unrestricted general operating funds because it needs to be applied everywhere across the organization and not one specific program. But you can be able to understand that story and tell that story so the donor understands where the need truly is and that helps sell that story to them and make that sale for them.
Speaker 1:I love it, I absolutely love it, and this is what helps you to create an impactful story for your organization. This is what helps you to tell your donors, or just anyone who is interested in your organization, where the opportunities lie for them to be involved. And so that's, that's amazing to me. And I think, just on, just on a last note here Right, because we've seen a lot of nonprofits start up over the last few years, right, there's been an increase in nonprofits starting up, and so I want to look at how really quickly they can sort of manage their budgets, because sometimes I think people kind of put the cart before the horse and they feel like, oh, I have this amount of money, so I want to start hiring people and start, you know, doing this and doing that.
Speaker 1:And so I just kind of want to get your thoughts and tell the listeners. You know how you can really tell when you're ready, number one, to start hiring, when you're ready to really start spending. You know big dollars on certain things. You know how can you really gauge your readiness in the organization with your budget.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, depending on where you are, if you're just starting out, if you're about to launch a nonprofit, or you've been in operations for a few months, six months a year I think it's really important to start to lay out and you can start very, very simply with Excel or Google Sheet and just lay out all of the pieces of revenue that you either are receiving or expect to receive, and so you can create a category for government grants, if you're getting government grants, earned revenue, philanthropic dollars and just keep it that. And look at the next 12 months. I have a column for every single month July, august, september. I think I'm going to get this money here. I'm going to get this money here. You know what you've gotten the last couple of months, so you can use it as a baseline. It's just a projection. At the end of the day it's not going to be perfect. There's no way that we're not future tellers, right, we're not going to know exactly what's going to happen a year from now, but we can try to do our best educated guess in the next 12 months. This is what I'm going to get in terms of revenue, and now I know that these are my current costs. So this is how much I spend on personnel, this is how much I spend on consultants, this is how much I spend on rent, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera Again, high level, and you're projecting that out. So I know that my rent lease is X for the next 12 months, so I can put that in there. I know I'm going to spend this money every single month, right, and then you sum up the total expenses, you summed up the revenue, you summed up the expenses and you got to this net number and now you know, like, over the next 12 months, this is how much I'm going to have every single month in terms of earnings. Right, I'm going to bring in this much. You know we're in March right now. So let's say, I'm going to bring in this much in June and this is how much I think I'm going to spend in June. So then you get a sense of like I'm spending. You know, I know how much I'm going to spend.
Speaker 2:I've spent so far year to date January, february, march. This is how much I'm going to certain amount of money in the bank. So I started this year off with a hundred thousand dollars and then in January I brought in $10,000 and I spent $20,000. So now I'm down $10,000. Right, so now my cash is $90,000. Right, but next month I'm going to bring in a hundred thousand dollars grant. This is, this is going to be huge and they've already committed to me and in April I'm going to get this $100,000. And so now you know, I've spent $10,000 in February, $10,000 in March, $10,000 in April. So now I'm down to, let's say, $60,000. But now, next month I'm going to get this big $100,000 in.
Speaker 2:And so, knowing when the grants are going to come in, a check, right, because a grantor might say, hey, I'm awarding you a grant next month, right? So in April you learn that you're going to get this grant. Awesome, right, huge. You're going to get this a hundred thousand dollars, but you're not going to get the check until July, right? So now, like it's, it's, it's great that you're not that income, but you can start to make those investments, because you can't hire somebody in April and then start paying them in July either, right, so you have to have the cash in your bank to be able to do that. So I know, I've got this grant, it's committed grant, the money's coming in July, so I can start my hiring process with a goal of being that I start recruiting somebody to take over this new program or new function or whatever it might be. Specifically for that grant, I can start April with job postings and look to do interviews in May and do a hire in June and have that person start in July, and now I know I'll have the cash to do it. So now I'm going to spend $20,000 in payroll in July because I've got this $100,000 grant that's going to pay.
Speaker 2:So just basic level planning, I think, is really, really important in terms of like knowing when you are expecting to have cash and revenue coming into the organization and when those outlays are going to go out. When are those outflows? When are we going to actually spend some of these dollars? It will give you a view for the rest of the year. By the end of the year I'm going to be in good shape, but there's going to be some tight times here in the summer where I'm not going to have as much cash.
Speaker 2:What am I going to do about it? What can I do to mitigate that? Well, maybe I can negotiate with one of my consultants to go if I can pay them quarterly rather than monthly or something whatever that might be to start to think about. I know this issue is going to come up how am I going to mitigate? And start mitigating for that now, so that you're not stuck in July with oh my God, my bank balance just went negative because I had more cash going out this month than I, than I in the revenue. So it's, it's, that's what a CFO does. But when you don't have a CFO, these are tools and tips that a CEO can do, an executive director can do, to at least at a minimum understand where they're going in terms of cash.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love that. It was funny, but not funny because some people really don't look at it like this. When you said, well, we can't hire you in April but start paying you in July, like it just doesn't work like that. And I think another thing that people have to understand and remember is that even though you hire someone, maybe at a $45,000 salary, it's actually going to cost you closer to 47 to $50,000 to actually pay them. So those are other things that you have to keep in mind.
Speaker 2:Yep, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you, Neil. Thank you so much. This was such a great conversation. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I was really happy to be here. Thanks so much for the opportunity Spring.
Speaker 1:Guys, I hope you were able to catch all of these gems that Neil dropped. It was amazing. If you are a small nonprofit out there and you're trying to figure things out, he gave some great tips, Neil. If they want to get in touch with you or learn more about the things that you do and how you may be able to help their organization, how do they get in touch with you?
Speaker 2:Appreciate that you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I provide interim CFO solutions or services for nonprofit organizations. I also host a group of CFOs that is called the Nonprofit CFO Roundtable, where we have nonprofit CFOs from all different types of nonprofits come in every other week to talk through their various challenges and issues, and it's a really great opportunity for professional development for your CFO if you have a CFO, and so I host that group and I provide these services, and so it's cfogroupscom for the nonprofit CFO roundtable and you can find me on LinkedIn. Love to connect with you.
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome. Well, guys, thank you so much for tuning in and, as always, until next time on the Spring Forward podcast. Bye guys.