#ForFounders is a Kryvent series connecting nonprofit founders to the people and knowledge they need to build well. Through insights from experienced professionals across and beyond the social impact ecosystem, we share what helps organisations grow stronger, more structured, and more sustainable.

Welcome to another edition.

This week, we are speaking with an International Financial Consultant with over a decade of experience in finance and nonprofits in Europe, in national and international organisations like the United Nations Development Programme. Today’s guest is passionate about helping small NGOs achieve financial transparency, accountability, and sustainability.

Hello, can we meet you?

Hi, thank you for having me here today. My name is Borana Resulaj. I am an International Financial Consultant in the nonprofit sector. I am a member of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) in the United Kingdom, meaning that by background I am an accountant. I have over a decade of experience working in the sector, starting with different national and international foundations, UN agencies such as UNDP, and organisations mostly across Europe, including the Netherlands, France, and Germany.

My journey into NGO finance began with a simple mission. Across my experience, I consistently saw organisations with outstanding missions that could easily fail because of financial mismanagement. Many passionate organisations were doing transformative work, but they struggled because their financial systems were weak, reactive, and largely donor-driven rather than strategy-driven. Over the years, I specialised further in financial management and in building systems that help organisations succeed sustainably.

Today, I am the Director of NGO Finance Hub, a social consultancy startup focused on strengthening the financial systems of small and medium-sized nonprofits so they can confidently manage the resources entrusted to them.

Your career path spans national NGOs, UNDP, European networks, and now leading NGO Finance Hub. Was there something you observed internationally about how smaller organisations were being left behind?

Yes, and I will start by saying: scale. There is a real mismatch. What happens is that large, well-funded global organisations have strong financial teams, strong financial systems, and compliance structures, while smaller local nonprofits are expected to meet the same standards but without the same infrastructure. I do not believe standards should be compromised; standards should be the same for every organisation. However, there is an imbalance of support. Local organisations, instead of being strengthened, are often penalised because their financial systems are weak, and many organisations with brilliant programmatic expertise are excluded from funding simply because they lack financial maturity. Having noticed this more and more, I felt that every nonprofit, especially those with outstanding missions, truly deserves to have those finance systems in place. That is why I am on a mission to support them in doing so.

How do you approach building financial systems that are compliant but also scalable as an NGO grows? What should a small NGO put in place from year one?

Every organisation, whether small or large, must be compliant. There is no compromise there. However, compliance without scalability creates rigidity. If an organisation focuses only on meeting regulations, drafting policies, and following rules but does not design its systems to grow, it becomes stiff, slow, and inflexible.

On the other hand, scalability without compliance creates chaos. If an organisation expands its programmes, increases funding, and grows quickly without strong financial rules and accountability structures in place, things become disorganised and potentially dangerous very fast.

The balance lies in building systems that are principle-based, not person-based. People will come and go. Principles are what remain. If an organisation truly wants to survive and protect its mission, it must prioritise building healthy systems from the start.

From year one, even a small nonprofit should have:

• Simple but clear financial policies and procedures, written down.
• Segregation of duties, even if symbolic. For example, the board overseeing payment approvals.
• A chart of accounts designed around the organisation’s programmes and cost structure.
• A consistent monthly financial reporting rhythm, with clear steps outlining what happens first, second, and third.

What I often hear is: “We are small. We do not need financial policies yet.” That is a mistake. The earlier the foundations are set, the easier growth becomes. Policies can always be expanded later, but imagine scaling without any foundation.

Many early-stage founders operate with no finance staff, no software, sometimes just a spreadsheet and a bank account. What are the three non-negotiable financial systems every NGO must build first, even before they can afford a finance manager?

There are three non-negotiable financial systems every NGO must build, even before hiring a finance manager or bringing in a professional. Those who know me know how strongly I advocate for having professionals in-house, but these three must exist first.

The first is a cash flow tracking system. I do not mean a budget. I mean a forward-looking cash flow projection that is updated monthly. Not all grants arrive on time. Having commitments does not automatically translate into cash. The mission does not pay salaries; cash does. What gives leadership confidence is a clear, updated, timely projection of how much money is in the bank account today and what is expected by the end of next month.

The second is a system to track budgeted amounts versus actual spending. This is not about bank balances. Sometimes there is money in the bank, but it is not available for a specific project. Without proper budget monitoring in place, organisations can overspend very quickly without noticing. Or they may end the project or financial year with underspent budget lines, which is also a serious problem. How is it possible to have money allocated and not spend it properly? Organisations struggle because they lack funds, not because they have funds they cannot use effectively. Strong tracking and monitoring protect your strategy, your compliance, and your trust with donors.

The third, and no less important, is a clear documentation and authorisation workflow. This includes processes for expenses, payments, approvals, delegation of authority, and document retention. Systems must be principle-based, not person-based. Whoever steps into a role should clearly understand what needs to be done and at what stage. These are the three non-negotiables every organisation should have in place, even before hiring a finance professional.

You often talk about financial red flags. What are the most frequent ones you encounter when reviewing NGO accounts? Which of these are usually invisible to founders?

When I think about red flags in organisations I have worked with, including clients at NGO Finance Hub, several come to mind. If I had to rank them, I would say they are all equally important. However, the first one is delayed bank reconciliation.

The finance team may handle accounting and bookkeeping, but if what is reflected in the bank statement does not match what is recorded in the accounting system, that is a serious issue. Bank reconciliations should happen at least monthly. There is no compromise on that.

Another red flag is persistent overspending in a specific budget line. If this happens, it should immediately raise questions for leadership. Why is this happening? Was the budget unrealistic from the beginning? Have prices increased and the budget not been updated? Were procurement procedures not followed carefully? Were suppliers selected without proper comparison? There may be different explanations, but leaders must ask the right questions and decide on corrective action quickly.

A third red flag is the mixing of restricted and unrestricted funds. This happens frequently in the sector. Sometimes even leadership is unclear about the restrictions attached to a grant, and the finance team, focused on figures, may not have clarity on the contractual conditions. This creates compliance risks.

Another serious concern is when finances are controlled by the founder without oversight. I call this the principle of the four eyes. At least four people should review financial decisions. We are all human and can make mistakes. Responsibility should never rest with one person alone.

Finally, cash flow fragility must be mentioned in every discussion. An organisation may look healthy on paper, with positive financial statements, but if there is no liquidity and a cash gap emerges, the organisation can collapse very quickly. There are many other red flags, but if I had to highlight one above all, it would be cash flow.

Nigeria’s nonprofit sector struggles with a trust deficit, some earned and some unfair. From a finance and governance perspective, what concrete mechanisms help organisations demonstrate financial integrity beyond good intentions?

Thank you for bringing this up. I do not think this misconception exists only in Nigeria. It is common in many developing countries. In my own country, Albania, we face the same issue. What I often say is this: integrity must be structural, not emotional. You cannot simply declare that you operate with integrity. Your systems and structures must demonstrate it. There are concrete mechanisms that help build and prove financial integrity.

First, there must be independent board financial oversight. Every organisation should have an independent board of directors, not friends or close associates, who are able to provide objective oversight and take responsibility for governance.

Second, independent external audits add another layer of trust. They serve as a mechanism that reinforces credibility and strengthens confidence in the organisation.

Third, organisations should publish annual reports that are publicly available. Beyond describing their mission and achievements, these reports should include clear financial information. This allows the public and other stakeholders to verify that financial realities match the organisation’s narrative.

There should also be clear conflict of interest policies in place, not just for formality, but to be actively applied. Procurement procedures are equally important. Again, not simply as documents that exist, but as systems that ensure the organisation truly practises what it claims.

Finally, transparent salary structures are essential. Salary bands should be clear and, where appropriate, publicly communicated. This helps prevent misconceptions about how nonprofit funds are used and builds public confidence.

These are some of the most important mechanisms, although there are many others that contribute to building structural integrity.

Financial reports can be intimidating. How should organisations communicate financial performance to non-financial stakeholders in ways that build credibility?

This issue often starts within organisations themselves. Even in well-structured NGOs, you typically have a finance department, a development department, and a programme department. Yet these teams often work in silos. No one fully understands what the other is doing, even though everyone is working toward the same mission.

Finance may speak in accounting jargon. The development team may feel they are doing the most important work because they bring in funding. The programme team may believe they carry the mission on their shoulders. This disconnect creates operational, managerial, and even strategic problems.

The first step is for these departments to communicate using a shared language. Finance professionals may be comfortable discussing accounts receivable or operating surpluses, but those terms are not always meaningful to non-financial colleagues or stakeholders.

For example, instead of saying there is an operating surplus of £12,000, you could say the organisation has secured enough reserves to operate for three additional months without new funding. That makes the information accessible and relevant.

Visuals also help. Clear charts and visualisations make financial ratios easier to understand. While finance professionals may need to conduct detailed analyses, the results should be explained in plain language.

Another important approach is to link financial summaries directly to programmes. Every financial report prepared for the board or other stakeholders should include narrative explanations of programmatic achievements. Financial data should be connected to what the organisation has accomplished.

In short, finance should tell a story about sustainability and mission. It cannot tell that story through numbers alone.

Having worked inside organisations like UNDP, you have seen the funder side of the table. What do funders actually see in an NGO’s financial reports that founders do not realise they are revealing?

I will start with the strength of internal controls, because the environment where nonprofit organisations operate is very dynamic, meaning that directors and people are overstretched and sometimes do not appreciate the bureaucracies of internal controls: the delegation of duties, authorisation matrices, and so on. Sometimes they may bypass several steps of these internal controls. Funders are very cautious when it comes to internal controls, because it signals that the organisation is prepared and has oversight mechanisms in place. This should not be tolerated.

The second point is related to dependency ratios. What is a dependency ratio? It measures how dependent you as an organisation are on one donor. You have a mission and you have one big donor who funds 70% of that mission, and one day you wake up and this donor withdraws. What are you going to do? Are you prepared for that? When you say, “Our mission is 75% funded by one single donor,” this may feel comfortable in operational terms; you have only one donor to deal with and only one reporting framework to manage. However, 2025 told us another story: your funding can be withdrawn overnight and you may have to make people redundant overnight as well. So that is the second point: dependency ratio.

On liquidity risk, I may sound like a broken record, but cash flow will always be an issue and I will not get tired of raising it in every conversation. I have been part of many discussions about liquidity with very stressed directors fearing they would not be able to meet payroll, even when their financial statements showed a positive result.

What is also very important for funders is consistency between the narrative and the financial data. This brings us back to the need for all departments to come together: not just to speak a shared language, but to tell one story. The communications team will tell it through storytelling; we will tell it through numbers. But both should be consistent and speak to each other.

Fundraising is often treated as a communications problem, but you approach it as a financial management issue. How does the quality of an NGO’s internal financial systems directly affect its ability to raise funds?

A poor financial system will quietly reduce your funding opportunities. It may not happen in the blink of an eye; funds will not stop immediately. But it will happen quietly, and the cases where this occurs are various.

First, if you have completed a project and your systems are so disorganised that you cannot provide a financial report within the deadline stated in the contract, this will be problematic for your organisation. Faster reporting builds trust and ensures the continuity of the relationship. This is not a one-time relationship; it is one you want to maintain with the donor.

Secondly, it is related to the proposal period. When an organisation applies for a project, having accurate costing systems means you will produce realistic proposals for the donor. We will notice the absence of this during project implementation, where there will be many discrepancies between actual expenditures and budgeted amounts.

Having strong reserves would signal stability for your organisation, though I acknowledge this is a long and difficult conversation. I intentionally described it as delicate because reserves cannot be built overnight, and the environment in which the nonprofit sector operates is highly uncertain, especially recently. It may sound like a luxury to speak about reserves when an organisation cannot meet its end-of-month obligations. However, reserve building is something that should be on every leader’s mind, even if they start small.

So that is how financial systems build trust. I would also add that fundraisers, communications teams, and finance professionals can together produce very strong project proposals, but only if the finance team is brought into the picture from day one. What typically happens is that finance professionals learn about a project proposal only two days before the deadline, when colleagues need a budget. That can no longer be the case. The finance team should be involved from the start, not because I am a finance professional seeking importance, but because it is a reality that will help your organisation build a successful and strong future.

Many founders feel pressured to understate overheads to look efficient. How should NGOs handle this tension? What is the long-term cost to the sector when nonprofits chronically underfund their overheads?

This is a very long and very old discussion, and it looks like we will never have one right answer, but we will have different approaches to it. I am directly affected by this, if I may put it that way, because finance is seen as a back office function and automatically falls within overheads, and we know very well that donors do not really want to fund operations.

There are two angles from which I want to discuss this topic. The first is related to the sector and the organisations within it. What they do is shrink themselves to such an extent that they start taking pride in not having high operational costs, and sometimes they create a false standard within the sector. We all know, because we are all part of this sector, how difficult it is to keep programmes going without leadership, finance, operations, administration, IT, governance, strategic planning, and compliance. There are so many things needed to keep the wheel rolling.

When organisations publicly claim they have low operational costs, they create a false picture that damages other organisations in the sector. So the first thing we need to do is change the narrative and be truthful with ourselves: we cannot do this without operational costs and overheads. If we come together on this, we can start making donors aware that this is simply how it should be. Overheads should stand at a percentage that is calculated by the organisation, and if donors want programmes to run, they have to support the operations as well.

On the other side, what I would also like to emphasise is that organisations, when approaching donors, should change the narrative around overheads, and not by claiming they do not need operations. We need a narrative that places operational costs and programme costs at the same level of importance, explaining to donors, in proposals, in conversations, in relationships, that a programme run without operational costs is a half-run programme. It will not be of sufficient quality, and donors want quality when it comes to programming.

That is the kind of narrative I mean here. And even though it may sound somewhat rigid, organisations should start being bold when it comes to overheads. While I am fully aware of the struggle to keep the lights on, organisations should genuinely be bold about their operational needs, and sometimes decline to run a programme at all if donors refuse to fund the operations. I am sorry if that sounds like I am living on another planet, but if we do not set precedents and are not bold in standing by our values and our truth, then I am sorry: we are not going to make any change in this sector, even in the next 20 or 50 years.

How should African NGOs adapt international budgeting best practices to their realities? What does a truly “naira-proof” budget look like in practice?

Foreign currency exchange has especially recently been something I have been highly affected by in my own work, and I am pretty sure every organisation in the sector faces the same challenge.

To build a budget-proof, or in Nigeria’s case a naira-proof, budget, you need to include scenarios: foreign exchange uncertainty scenarios, specifically two or three of them, covering an optimistic, a pessimistic, and a neutral scenario. Every organisation should also have contingency lines for currency losses. Whenever an organisation prepares its budget, there should be a dedicated line for exchange rate fluctuations. There may be gains, there may be losses; I wish they are always gains, but losses are a real possibility.

Knowing that we operate in fragile foreign currency environments, we must have regular forecasting. We cannot simply create a budget at the beginning of the year, pay everything in local currency, and then discover at the end of the project that we are short by some significant amount. Regular forecasting brings us back again to cash flow and liquidity, which become critical issues for budget management in this context, because you are receiving money in one currency and paying for everything in your local currency.

What also typically happens is that organisations open their financial year with a budget that then stays static for the entire year. Organisations should instead be mindful to operate with dynamic budgets. There should also be an open conversation with the donor. I know donors can be rigid about these things; they provide the funds and essentially leave currency risk to the organisation. But I still believe in the power of communication and finding a common language with donors: exploring whether there is room for additional funds to cover currency losses, or, in the case of gains, having a conversation about retaining that money in the organisation to build the reserves we discussed earlier.

The topic is delicate because currency exchange movements are not predictable. You can prepare multiple scenarios, but you may still suffer losses in one way or another. What will help the organisation is regular forecasting: knowing where you stand, what you should be preparing for, and based on that, what conversations you need to have and what threads you need to keep open.

How are donor expectations around accountability and reporting changing globally?

These expectations change, not necessarily in cycles, but quietly or loudly, one way or another. Donors expect very evident internal controls. As I mentioned earlier, what funders truly need is evidence of internal controls. Not just saying, “Someone is responsible for approving and another for paying,” but showing where this is documented and providing evidence that these processes have actually taken place. Anti-fraud mechanisms must also be in place. Organisations should not just be aware of them but should be at the forefront of implementing and actively using them, especially given the kind of perception that exists in the wider public about the sector.

Donors also expect real-time reporting. You have to be prepared to report to them not only within the timelines written in the contract, but also at the moment they come to you needing information about what is happening. Your organisation should always be ready to respond promptly.

They will also sometimes expect digitalisation, especially when it comes to documentation. Documents are now mostly stored in the cloud, and auditors will no longer come to your office to go through thousands of folders of hard copies. So digitalisation is also something to take seriously. That is mostly what comes to mind, though I am sure there are other things donors would look for and expect.

I do not want to be too theoretical, so I want to bring in a few practical points. Given all the uncertainties we are aware of, the first thing to do is strengthen your financial transparency, and do so with written procedures. These procedures do not need to be sophisticated or forty pages long. They can be just three pages that clearly show how transparency is maintained within the organisation.

What practical advice would you give small or medium-sized NGOs struggling to improve their funding?

The organisation should develop a clear cost structure: how do they cost their programmes, and is this documented? They should also start building small unrestricted reserves. When I say small, I mean very small at the beginning, but set that aside in a separate bank account or simply designate it as a reserve that will help in difficult times.

What you should also do, and this may not sound like advice from a finance professional, but I believe it deeply, is invest heavily in relationship building, not just in proposal writing. The truth is that while I am a finance professional and may not be the one dealing directly with donors, I believe that relationships, communication, and patience are the gateway through which funding ultimately flows. In this sense, you should also track donor concentration ratios, meaning you should monitor how much funding you are receiving from each donor, so that you are able to diversify as much as possible.

That would be my suggestion. And it is very important for organisations to understand that they cannot afford to lose trust, because this will become an industry rumour very quickly. It is already difficult enough in the sector without adding the additional burden of rumours that an organisation is not fundable, lacks systems, or is not transparent or accountable. I am pretty sure that most of the time this lack of transparency and accountability does not happen intentionally; it happens because organisations do not have the capacity or are simply not aware of what is needed. So take it one step at a time. You can always start small and steady rather than attempting to scale too quickly, because scaling too fast risks putting your mission in danger very quickly.

What becomes clear from this conversation is that strong missions are sustained by strong systems. Financial health in a nonprofit is not about having money in the bank, but about building principled, scalable structures that protect cash flow, ensure accountability, and safeguard trust. When finance is disciplined, transparent, and clearly communicated, it becomes a strategic tool for sustainability rather than just a reporting obligation.

Many thanks to Borana Resulaj for this conversation and for sharing her knowledge with our readers.

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