You know your money is not working, but you do not yet know where the break is, and the break decides the work.
Financial trouble comes in five shapes that need completely different fixes: you cannot see your numbers at all, you can see them but there is no budget steering anything, the year adds up but the timing of cash keeps strangling you, your free and spoken-for money are tangled so you do not know your true position, or you have no cushion and know it. This guide sorts out which one you have, confirms the problem is really about managing money rather than raising it or filing it, separates a timing squeeze from a true deficit, and hands you a plan. It is a sorting instrument, not a fix. It will not clean up a ledger or produce a budget; it tells you which kind of trouble you have and in what order to work it. It takes about ninety minutes and whatever financial reports you can put your hands on.
That is the acute emergency, and it comes before the rest of this. First, collect: chase everything you are owed that is sitting uncollected. If the gap is still real after that, a short-term bridge such as a line of credit is a banker conversation, and this pathway helps you with it. Do this before you cut anything, and hold this truth: if the money is genuinely coming and simply is not here yet, do not cut a program that is paying its way to plug a hole that is only a delay. Take the immediate money to the steadiness check first, then come back and finish this diagnostic.
You cannot diagnose a financial problem you have not laid out: where you stand, how much cash you have, what you are owed, what has strings on it, and whether a budget exists. Pull your most recent statements, your bank balances, your list of what you are owed and what you owe, and any budget. Where the reports are too old to trust, say so and use the bank balances as your honest floor. Then mark, roughly, which of your money came in for a specific purpose and cannot be spent freely.
Open the Financial Snapshot →First, make sure you are in the right pathway. Then place your trouble in one of the five shapes, because the shape decides the guide. Answer honestly; the statements are worded as strengths, so an honest not true is where your trouble lives.
A finding is not enough until two honest questions test it. First, is your shortage a matter of timing, money coming but not yet here, or a real gap between what you bring in and what you spend? Second, is your cash actually yours, or is some of it spoken-for money that only looks like breathing room? Take your cash and subtract, as best you can, the money that is spoken for; what remains is your real breathing room.
If you are genuinely spending more than you can bring in, and it is not a timing effect, that is a structural problem no cleaner bookkeeping can fix. It routes three ways at once: to the funding work for more revenue, to mission clarity and strategic direction for the honest question of whether all of this work belongs in your organization, and, where the answer may be no, to mergers, partnerships and restructuring.
And if this reveals that money given for a specific purpose has already been spent on something else, stop and treat that as its own serious matter. Make Master Restricted and Unrestricted Funds your first guide, and get a nonprofit accountant involved, because a spent restriction can be a legal question, not only a management one.
Turn the finding into an ordered plan that names your first guide and follows the order financial management is actually built: see, plan, manage the cash, sort the strings, build the cushion. Where you have more than one finding, sequence them: see first, then either sort the strings or build the budget, then manage the cash, then build the cushion. Add anything the reality check surfaced, and give the first guide a real start date.
Open the Prioritized Financial Plan →Your answers stay in your browser on this page and are never sent anywhere. Use Save or print to keep your copy.
Two moments here call for a professional. If anything in this look raises the question of whether money given for a purpose was spent on something else, or whether a filing or tax obligation has lapsed, get a nonprofit accountant, and if there is legal exposure, an attorney, before you go further. These are not paperwork errors you can quietly fix. And if working through your numbers makes plain that you, the leader, are carrying the fear of this alone and running on empty, treat that as its own priority and lean on a trusted person or a professional, because no organization survives its leader breaking. Naming either of these is not the guide failing. It is the guide being honest about where its edge is.
Once the immediate money is handled and you are on your feet, it is worth stepping back to look at the whole organization, not just the part that was on fire. There is a short whole-organization check-up waiting for you when you are ready. That is not a sales pitch. It is the next honest thing to look at. The whole-organization check-up →