For human-services nonprofits with government contracts

You are delivering service you cannot prove.

And it is costing you money at renewal. Not because anyone is doing anything wrong, but because reporting requirements went up while the money to handle them went down. We find the number in ten days, for a fixed price.

Book the audit Estimate your number first

Ten business days. Fixed price, published below. No software to buy. No retainer.

$23.4Bof Medicaid payments in FY2024 were classified improper for insufficient documentation alone
45%of nonprofits report late payment from government
$84,899average past-due balance local governments owe each affected nonprofit
44%get new reporting requirements mid-contract with no extra money
What it actually looks like

It starts with a Post-it.

A counselor finishes a session at 5:40 on a Thursday. It ran long, because they always run long. She has one more family waiting, her own kid to pick up at six, and a parking situation. She writes the session on a Post-it, tells herself she will log it Monday, and leaves.

Monday there are eleven new referrals sitting in the inbox.

That session happened. A young person got real help from a trained professional. It changed something. And nine months later, when the county pulls the file, it did not happen.

That is the undocumented hour. Now multiply it by a year.

Nobody in that building is doing anything wrong. They are working hard and most of them are underpaid. The problem is structural: more reporting every year, no additional money to handle it, and fewer people staying long enough to build a system. Nonprofit turnover runs around 19% against 12% in other sectors, and at organizations under $2M it routinely passes 25%. The reporting does not stop happening. It gets absorbed by frontline staff, at the end of the day, on a Post-it.

Read the full piece: The Undocumented Hour

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Estimate your undocumented hours

Move the sliders to match your program. Every value here is your assumption, not an industry benchmark. There is no published national figure for how much delivered service goes undocumented, which is exactly why the audit exists.

Example: 8 individual sessions at 1 hour plus 8 group sessions at 2 hours equals 24.
No national statistic exists for this. Set it where your own instinct puts it. Organisations that log at the session tend to guess low. Organisations that log weekly tend to guess high, and are usually still guessing low.
$16,200
Unclaimable service, per year
Service hours delivered6,000
Hours with no record360
Participants your file understates15
Exposure across the contract term$48,600
The audit that finds the real number$2,500

This is arithmetic on numbers you supplied, not a finding. It counts only directly unclaimable service. It does not price the renewal you lose to a provider who does less good work and documents all of it, and it does not price a county monitoring finding.

Get the real number
Why this stays broken

The obvious fixes do not work.

✕

Buy case management software

For a 13-person team, a mid-tier platform runs roughly $830 to $2,000 a month plus a $5,000 to $15,000 implementation fee. That is $15,000 to $39,000 in year one, and most vendors will not publish a price at all. Then the person who configured it leaves and nobody trusts it.

✕

Hire a compliance person

With what. That salary lives in indirect. The federal de minimis rate rose to 15% in October 2024, which helps, but most county and foundation contracts still cap overhead well below what a compliance salary costs.

✕

Train the staff harder

They are not undertrained. They are over-assigned. Adding a documentation expectation to a caseworker already at 130% capacity does not produce documentation. It produces turnover, and turnover is what destroys institutional memory in the first place.

✕

Build it internally this summer

Someone will, and they will do a decent job, and eighteen months later they will take a better-paying job and the system will die with them. That is not cynicism. That is the base rate in this sector.

The engagement

The Center Hours Audit

Ten business days. Fixed price, fixed scope, fixed end date. We map how a client actually moves through your organization, from the moment a referral arrives to the moment a number lands on a funder report, and we find every point where the information dies.

Other operations audits give you a ranked list of risks. This one gives you a number.

What you keep

1

The Failure Map

One page. Every point in your pipeline where service is delivered and information is lost, ranked by dollar exposure.

2

The Loss Estimate

A defensible dollar figure for service delivered in the last twelve months that cannot be documented, billed, or defended, calculated from your records rather than from a benchmark.

3

The Monitoring Exposure List

Every documentation gap a county subrecipient monitor or a single audit would surface. Plain English, with the citation.

4

The Fix Sequence

What to fix first, second, third. What costs nothing. What costs something. What you can do yourselves without us.

5

A one-page board summary

Written so you can hand it over as it is, plus a 45-minute walkthrough with you and whoever else needs to hear it.

The ten days, in order

Nothing here is open ended. Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed end date.

1-2

Intake and document request

One kickoff call. A single document request goes out: your contract and deliverable spec, your last four funder reports, and whatever service logs exist. If a document does not exist, that is already a finding.

3-5

Interviews

Four to six conversations, thirty minutes each, remote. Frontline through leadership, plus whoever actually produces the funder report. That last person is usually where the risk lives.

6-8

Reconciliation and the number

Delivered service is traced against what the record supports and what the funder was told. The gap between those three is the loss estimate, and it is calculated, not assumed.

9

The fix sequence

Findings get ranked by dollar exposure and sequenced. Sequencing matters more than the list. Fixing things in the wrong order is how most improvement plans die in month two.

10

Findings session and handoff

Forty-five minutes. Walk the map, walk the number, walk the plan. Board chair welcome. Then the documents are yours.

What we need from you

Four to six staff interviews at 30 minutes each. One program's contract and deliverable spec. Your last four funder reports. Under five hours of organizational time across two weeks, and most of the document request is already sitting in a drive folder.

What this is not

Not software. Not a subscription. Not a six-month implementation. We are not selling you a database. Your problem is not that you lack a place to put information. Your problem is that the information never gets there.

Before you book

This is not for everybody.

Right fit

  • Human services nonprofit between $500K and $15M
  • At least one government contract or grant with defined deliverables
  • Service counted in sessions, hours, encounters, placements or visits
  • Programs that grew faster than the systems underneath them
  • A contract renewal or county monitoring visit coming in the next twelve months
  • An ED who can approve $2,500 without a board vote

Not a fit

  • Organizations under $500K
  • No government contract or grant
  • Pure advocacy or policy organizations
  • Already running a case management platform your staff genuinely use
  • Anyone who wants a report to file rather than a number to act on
  • Situations where the ED is not the one deciding
Published prices, because almost nobody does

Four ways to work together.

Most people start with the audit and stop there. That is a completely legitimate outcome and the report is written so you can act on it without us.

Kit
$197
Self-serve. Instant download.
  • Intake templates by referral source
  • Service log structure
  • Threshold alert logic
  • Monthly ED report format
  • Funder report template
  • One-page wall SOP
Ask for it
Audit
$2,500 / $3,500
Single program / multi-program. Ten business days.
  • Failure map
  • Dollarized loss estimate
  • Monitoring exposure list
  • Prioritized fix sequence
  • One-page board summary
  • 45-minute walkthrough
  • No obligation to anything else
Book the audit
Build
$8k to $18k
Four to six weeks. Quoted from what the audit found.
  • Intake route per referral source
  • Case record that survives turnover
  • Service logger, two taps from a phone
  • Threshold alerts before the shortfall
  • MOU and referral commitment tracker
  • Auto-generated monthly and funder reports
  • Full audit trail
  • Staff training and a wall SOP
Talk it through
Care
$1,200 to $2,500 / mo
Approximately 6 to 12 hours a month. Cancel any time, keep your data.
  • System maintenance
  • Quarterly funder reports generated for you
  • New-staff onboarding, every time
  • New funder formats as contracts change
  • Annual re-measurement of your loss rate
  • Priority support
Talk it through
$1,000 of the audit fee is credited toward the build if you engage within 60 days. If you do not, you keep the failure map, the number, the exposure list, the fix sequence and the board summary anyway. There is no version of this where you pay $2,500 and walk away with nothing.

There is also a Controls add-on at $1,800 to $4,000 covering access offboarding, payment verification protocol, and permission review. Ask about it if a departing employee has ever kept access longer than they should have.

Straight answers

Questions you are already thinking.

We already have a system.

Then show us how you produced last quarter's service-unit report. If someone opens a spreadsheet and starts explaining, you are carrying undocumented hours right now and nobody knows how many. If you are running a well-configured platform your staff actually use, you do not need us, and we will tell you that on the first call for free.

Our federal spend is under $1 million, so we do not get a single audit. Does this still matter?

More than it did. The single audit threshold rose from $750,000 to $1,000,000 in October 2024, which removed the statutory audit for a lot of organizations. It did not remove the risk, it moved it. The federal government still holds your county accountable for how it monitors you, so counties have to look harder at subrecipients than they used to. The pressure shifted from an auditor once a year to your contract manager continuously.

We do not have budget for this.

The better question is which contract has capacity-building, technical assistance, or startup dollars in it, and when your next award lands. Capacity building and organizational effectiveness funds routinely cover assessment work, and many funders will pay for an audit faster than they will pay for staff. Bring your funder relationships to the call and we will look at what is available.

Who are you to tell us about our own operation?

Fair. We are not clinicians and we will never tell you how to serve a young person. We work on exactly one thing: the path information takes from the moment service is delivered to the moment it becomes a number a funder accepts. Your staff know the program better than anyone. Almost nobody has forty uninterrupted hours to map that path, because they are all delivering service.

Is our client data safe?

The audit does not require access to identified client records. We work from process, contract specs, service logs and aggregate reports. If you later engage a build, everything is designed with role-based access, encryption at rest, full audit logging, and a signed data agreement before a single record moves. We carry errors and omissions coverage.

What do you do with the findings afterwards?

Your report is yours and it is confidential. With your written permission we add anonymized, aggregated figures to a sector benchmark so that future clients can see how they compare. No organization name, no identifying detail, no individual data ever published, sold or disclosed. You can decline and it changes nothing about the engagement or the price.

What if we just want the report and nothing else?

Genuinely fine, and it happens. The report is written so your own team can act on it. There is no upsell built into the deliverable and no pressure on the walkthrough call.

How fast can you start?

Usually within two weeks. The engagement itself is ten business days from the first interview.

Find out what your number is.

Fifteen-minute call. One question to start: show us how you produced last quarter's service-unit report. We will tell you honestly whether you need us.

Start the conversation

Or read the long version first: The Undocumented Hour