Small Business & Nonprofit Finance Blog

By Jasmine Thompson | Stellar Consulting Inc. A client called me after receiving an email from a program officer she'd had a great relationship with for years. The email was about $4,200 of expenses she'd charged to a federal grant that the grant language didn't cover. She'd been a good steward of that grant in every other way, she just hadn't caught this one detail. Here's what happened, and more importantly, how we made sure it never happened again. The Call I Never Want Yo

By Jasmine Thompson | Stellar Consulting Inc. Over 20+ years of working with small business owners, I've collected a list of the beliefs that cost people the most money, not because anyone was careless, but because no one ever told them otherwise. Let me fix that. Every one of the myths below is something I've heard from real clients, smart, capable people who were working with incomplete information. None of these beliefs are your fault. Most of them came from well-meaning a

By Jasmine Thompson | Stellar Consulting Inc The first thing I do when a new client gives me access to their QuickBooks is run a report I call the "chaos check." In 20+ years I've done this hundreds of times. What I'm about to share is what I almost always find and what it means for your business. I want to be clear before we go further: none of this is a reflection of your intelligence or your dedication to your business. The clients I work with are smart, hardworking people

By Jasmine Thompson | Stellar Consulting Inc Nonprofits and community-based organizations face a financial compliance burden that most for-profit businesses never encounter. Federal awards, state contracts, city and county grants, each comes with documentation requirements, reporting standards, and audit exposure that can sink an organization if the financial infrastructure isn't built to handle it. The good news: the right technology makes a lot of this manageable and attain

The most financially confident small business owners I've worked with don't all have the most complex systems. They don't all have the biggest budgets or the fanciest software. What they have in common is this: they check in with their numbers every single month. Not at tax time. Not when something feels off. Not when the bank balance dips and there's a sinking feeling in the stomach. Every. Single. Month. And the check-in doesn't take long.

Let's be honest about something. Most small business owners don't struggle with bookkeeping because they're not smart or capable. They struggle because no one ever gave them a simple, practical system to follow — one that works in real life, week after week, not just during tax season panic. That's exactly why I created the Small Business Bookkeeping Bundle. It's not a course. It's not complicated software training. It's a ready-to-use toolkit — checklists, trackers, and plan

You don’t need a huge finance department to stay compliant. You need a system that matches how grants work. 1) Start with the grant requirements (before you spend a dollar) Before spending begins, get clear on: the budget categories (and any restrictions) reporting deadlines match requirements (if any) documentation standards whether costs must be tracked by program, location, or funding source If you don’t translate the grant terms into your accounting system early, you’ll e