khull
Forum Replies Created
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Yes, I do consider materiality, for reasonableness. For instance, if a staff person brings in a bag of coffee to share, that saves us from buying more but I can’t reasonably track all of those instances. Generally, we’ve used our capitalization threshold as the materiality limit.
Another way to look at it would be from the donor’s perspective. Are they considering it a contribution, and/or expecting a receipt? If so it should also be recorded in your books.
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Steve, our finance committee has determined for now that 3 months reserve is the target, so when we budget each year we budget for an amount to set aside in reserves to get the reserve fund up to 25% of that year’s budget.
We’ve had conversations over the years of whether we should move up to 4, 5, or 6 months, but for now 3 months is doable for us and provided us a good safety net in times when we were unsure about what funds would be coming in.
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As a non-cash item, we did also do organization wide “rest days” during the pandemic. Over the past few years, we’ve given on average 4 or 5 extra days off per year. Like Nancy mentioned, we did have staff who weren’t taking their vacation, but one benefit to this approach for us was that everyone was off at the same time, so that folks could step away for a day and not come back to a bunch of stuff to catch up on. I realize this approach would be much harder for a direct service provider.
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Can it be a mixture of both? There is certainly a role for making sure that conversations stay on track, but the moderators may also be able to offer some insights or resources. However, I think the moderators should be intentional about when and if they are adding to the threads. If moderators are always the first to respond, it may stifle community input and ideas.
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Are there other foundation funders who would be willing to help provide one or two years of support to get your wages up? We’ve found that funders in our area have become very attuned to the equity issues when nonprofits pay so much less than other roles, so we have been able to get some shorter term funding to help us raise salaries.