Nonprofit Services

Tesseract can help fix and manage your nonprofit’s finances.

Nonprofits, or as we prefer to say, for-purpose organizations, require an advanced level of financial management to satisfy donors, funders, and the government.  Yet, most nonprofits were started by dynamic arts and social justice practitioners who’s greatest skills lie elsewhere.  We can help.

We’ll support the vital work you’re doing advancing your organization’s mission by giving you financial clarity, literacy, and peace of mind.  And you’ll have more time to do the important work that only you can do.

We can help fix and manage your nonprofit’s finances through four primary services:

Core Financial Management

Payroll Support

Budgeting &
Future Planning

Business Office Management

We understand that each business is unique, so we offer every nonprofit a tailored combination of these services to maximize our impact.  While we work only on retainer, our pricing is equitable and based on a sliding scale according to your organization’s annual revenue. 

Core Financial Management

Tesseract’s signature service uses customized bookkeeping and monthly dashboarding to give you a comprehensive understanding of your nonprofit’s finances. We also provide a one-time clean-up of your books to make sure we’re working from a solid foundation.

    • A one-time books onboarding, as needed: cleanup of the chart of accounts, bank registers, balance sheet, class tracking, and more to establish a new upgraded baseline from which all finance work flows.

    • Year-round expert accrual bookkeeping reconciled monthly

    • Fiscal year-end adjustments to align with accounting best practices.

    • Collaboration with your accountant or auditor for annual audit/990 preparations.

    • Government compliance and filings, including annual 1099 processing.

    • Financial reporting for grant applications and final reports.

    • Board of Directors-specific reporting delivered in a timely fashion; participation in board meetings as requested.

    • Regular standing meetings to review important financial data using uniquely designed dashboards.

Payroll Support

Making sure your staff gets paid is vitally important, yet processing payroll can feel like a regular drain on your time. Let us handle it so you have one less thing to worry about and we’ll make sure it’s running smoothly on time, every time.

    • Develop an ongoing system to collect payroll information from your staff: reporting hours worked, PTO, and more.

    • Process payroll through your payroll software on time, every time.

    • Manage employee deductions for retirement plans, health insurance, and more.

    • Ensure payroll software is accurately filing all tax documents and troubleshoot any compliance issues.

Budgeting & Future Planning

Creating an annual budget and planning for the future is a critical step in achieving financial clarity, literacy, and peace of mind . Our team can develop systems and tools that facilitate functional, impactful budgets and help you track those budgets alongside other important metrics.  

    • Lead the process of developing an annual budget.

    • Support program budget creation, setting and tracking metrics, and other projects to be determined.

    • Report budget vs actuals for both annual and program budgets.

    • Lead a mid-FY reforecast.

    • Provide financial future casting to help the organization determine viability of long-range initiatives.

Business Office Management

Let us handle the exhausting work of ongoing business office management so that you can focus on advancing your organization’s mission.  We’ve developed a highly efficient approach to paying vendors, collecting receivables, coordinating insurance, and all those other tasks that keep your business humming.

    • Ownership of the payables and receivables processes, including customer/vendor setup, payables/receivables processing, and year-end compliance.

    • Ongoing cash flow projections to make sure you don’t pay bills you can’t cover and regular meetings to coordinate payments.

    • Creation and implementation of company fiscal policies and procedures.

    • Business insurance support, including annual insurance audits.

You’re in Good Company.

Tesseract is proud to be supporting these companies doing meaningful work in their communities:

  • The work done by Tesseract has been truly amazing as it offers me as an Executive Director the time to focus on the other many responsibilities I have. Their work has fully given me peace of mind when it comes to our financial operations. Muntu Dance Theatre is blessed to have such hard working, dedicated, skilled, focused and all around dynamic people on our team. My job is so much easier having them.

    Sekou Conde
    Executive Director
    Muntu Dance Theatre

  • Tesseract has made The Chicago Puppet Festival's finances more transparent and provided greater perspective than I have experienced in decades of nonprofit and for-profit work with numerous organizations. Now all of my decisions are fully informed by models that give us a proactive understanding of short term impact as well as longer term results so we can make optimal strategic choices.

    Sandy Smith Gerding
    Executive Director
    Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival

  • Tesseract has been an invaluable partner for Music Theater Works. Their expertise and support have provided us with clarity and peace of mind regarding our finances and business management, something we deeply appreciate and don't know how we ever handled without them. They truly take a load off our plate, allowing us to operate with greater confidence and efficiency.

    Christopher Riley
    Managing Director
    Music Theater Works

  • Tesseract brings a wealth of nonprofit knowledge and business skills that have given Joel Hall Dancers & Center clarity on business decision-making and strengthened our financial planning and auditing process. Cameron's experience with nonprofits gives him additional sensitivity and responsiveness to our needs as a 501c3 navigating the philanthropic sector with a very small administrative team.

    Joe Pindelski
    Executive Director
    Joel Hall Dancers & Center