Federal funding has stopped behaving like federal funding. A practitioner's read on what changes — and the small, durable habits that quietly insulate a non-profit board against the worst of it.
Read the featureSix pieces, drawn from the firm's practice this quarter — three field reports, one editor's essay, and the dispatches column.
Inventory tells the truth, when the standards are right. A walk-through of cost rolls, variance analysis, and the small refinements that quietly recover margin you didn't know you'd lost.
The audit is not a season; it is a posture. Five public-company clients moved this year, and the audit-prep hours fell with them. Notes on the migration, and the cadence we settled on.
Most closely-held firms have a distribution calendar they do not write down. A short essay on why they should — and how a written rhythm changes the relationship between the operator and the family.
Fourteen grants now sit inside their last ninety days across our non-profit book. A short note on the conversations we are having with boards, and the move from quarterly to monthly cadence on these.
A short, plain statement of why partners' signatures appear on every federal return the firm prepares, and why the firm declines engagements in which it would prepare but not sign.
A blinded account of the patterns the firm's forensic module flagged this year across active engagements, and how the conversation with audit committees ran when we did.
In the firm's twentieth year, the habit we are most often asked about is the simplest one. We close every client's books within ten business days of month-end, every month. Not most months. Not in calmer quarters. Every month, for fifteen years and counting.
The discipline is not glamorous. It does not appear in pitch decks. But it is, in my experience, the single practice that separates an accounting function that is useful to a board from one that is merely accurate by the time of the audit.
The reason is simple. A month closed inside ten days is a month a board can act upon. A month closed at six weeks is a month already overtaken by the next. The longer the close, the more the operating team begins to treat the financials as history, and the financial team as archivists. Both of those drift are bad for the firm, and worse for the organization the firm is supposed to serve.
We hold the cadence by treating any slippage as an event. A missed close is debriefed within the week. We do not have many such debriefs to run, and that is the point.
A month closed inside ten days is a month a board can act upon. A month closed at six weeks is a month already overtaken by the next.
−54%
Twelve items the partners thought were worth committing to print this quarter. Read in any order.
Three of our manufacturing clients now hold standing weekly calls with procurement to recompute landed cost. We are seeing margin compression of 90–140 bps where the hedge has not yet caught up.
Notice was given quietly; the change was not in the headlines. Clients in three sectors have been moved onto a tighter calendar for affected returns.
Across the firm's non-profit book, fourteen restricted-fund grants are approaching expiration. Every board has been called this quarter to walk the position.
A regional manufacturer's ledger migration closed inside its window, with the variance held below the standard the firm committed to in the engagement letter.
For a community foundation client. We do not generally publish times for filings, but this one is worth a note: it was a redesign of the prior year's working papers more than a filing.
The firm declined a systems engagement on which it could not place an accounting practice for the year following go-live, in keeping with the long-standing rule of the practice.
Ground Truth is a quarterly from Summit Ledger Services, P.C., a senior-led accounting firm of twenty years. The pieces in this issue are written by working partners about active engagements. The firm itself is what's described below.
Reporting, reconciliations, payroll, AP/AR, fixed assets, intercompany — daily entries, monthly close, ten-day cadence.
Grant tracking, Form 990, tax compliance & filings, audit liaison year-round. Returns prepared by the firm are signed by partners.
Budgets & board reporting, risk-focused forensic review, ERP & ledger implementations, reporting infrastructure.
Ground Truth is sent four times a year to subscribers and to every client of the firm. The piece you can act on is what we ship. The piece we cannot defend, we do not publish.