Hello everybody, Dennis Chamberlain here with the National Philanthropy Resource Center
and your non-profit tip of the week.
Today I'm here with Craig Hartzheim.
Craig is a partner at Moss Levy and Hartzheim, which is a CPA firm that's been in business
now for about 54 years.
They do business in about 35 of the states within the United States.
And today I wanted to talk to you about the importance of annual audits for your non-profit
organization.
There's many reasons why you as a non-profit organization should be really seriously looking
into having your books audited on an annual basis, not the least of which is financial
transparency.
But Craig, what does financial transparency mean in the eyes of a donor?
Well, Dennis, usually what it means is an auditor comes in, a third party independent
audit firm will come in, look at the books and records, and make sure everything is reported
accurately under government or under generally accepted accounting standards and generally
accepted accounting principles.
And therefore any donor will understand this and know if the auditee gets a clean opinion
that things are running well within the entity.
Another reason why your non-profit should be very interested in getting annual audits
is the fact that it opens doors to gifts, to donations for your organization from both
private foundations, private individuals, and federal funding grantees.
Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Well, Dennis, it's just the fact again with the transparency issue is that when an auditor
audits an auditee, we issue a report that talks about not only the financial representations
that are included in the audit, but we do do some testing of internal control which really
makes the donors, gives them a more fuzzy feeling about donating money to you as an
auditee or as a donor.
So a warm fuzzy feeling, that's a good thing if you're a donor.
I mean, what if you're an organization, if you're a non-profit that's just starting out
and they say, well, you know, we're just, we're young, you know, we don't need to get
our books audited now.
As you said, Dennis, there's always a reason to have it audited and there's that opportunity
cost that you're going to spend X amount of $1,000 to have an audit, but you're going
to be ready for that next donor that needs an audited financial statement in order to
grant you funds.
The federal government requires audited financial statements, so if you're trying to procure
any type of grant from the federal government, you're going to have to have an audit.
So as Dennis had intimated before, it's good process to go ahead and have that audit done
right away so that you can present it to any grant or agency.
So there's another real big reason why I'm excited to have Craig Hartzheim with us here
today.
Craig and I have been talking off camera as we were preparing to do this segment and
he shared a pretty special announcement with me.
Okay, Dennis.
Yes, thank you.
I wanted to offer you, the viewers today, our firm, Mossleven Hartzheim, will provide
audit and tax services for any non-profit entity that qualifies a full-blown audit and tax
preparation of federal and state returns for an introductory fee of somewhere between
$3,000 and $5,000.
That's awesome.
Now, if you've had your books audited before, you know, and you've probably just fallen
off of your chair, so I'll give you a second to get back on it.
If you haven't done your audits before and you're a non-profit that's been waiting, I'm
going to tell you you're certainly welcome to shop around and I would always encourage
you to get the second and third opinions on the cost of audits, but what you're going
to find is that this blows the doors off of it.
This is an incredible offer that Craig has just made, so I thank you so much, Craig.
And for those of you who are interested, fill in your information below, click submit, and
you'll be on your way.
