Notes
Writing on grant compliance and audit readiness
Practical notes on the documentation habits that decide whether a grant record survives being examined. No thought leadership, no predictions — the regulation and what it means in a working week.
August 2026 · Audit practice
What auditors actually ask for in a Single Audit
Nine common requests, translated out of testing language. Almost every one is asking the same question in a different costume: was there a contemporaneous, attributable record made at the time by a named person.
August 2026 · Subrecipient monitoring
Why subrecipient monitoring findings repeat every year
Findings here are almost never about money. They are about a file that cannot show a risk assessment happened, that monitoring matched the risk, or that findings were followed up — three failures with one shared cause.
August 2026 · Single Audit
Eight weeks out: preparing without reconstructing
What to gather and in what order, starting from the SEFA — and the right way to handle a documentation gap you cannot close, which is never to create the document now and date it then.
August 2026 · Risk assessment
A defensible way to score subrecipient risk
The regulation requires an evaluation but prescribes no method. Six factors, three tiers, and the monitoring each tier should trigger — plus why a documented override beats a score nobody questioned.
This is a new publication
Four pieces, all published this month, and we are not going to pad the list to look established. New notes are added when we learn something from a customer's audit worth writing down — which is a slower cadence than a content calendar and a more useful one.
If there is a question you keep having to answer for your board or your funder, tell us and we will write about it: get in touch.
The templates behind these notes
Every piece here has a downloadable checklist or template alongside it. All free, no account.