Grant accounting is the discipline of tracking, recording, and reporting on each grant separately to prove the money was spent as required by the funder.

A grant is not revenue in the ordinary sense. It arrives with conditions: spend it on specific activities, within a defined timeframe, and report back. Grant accounting creates the paper trail that makes compliance demonstrable, not just asserted.

What fails most often is not intent but documentation. A non-profit that allocated grant funds correctly but cannot produce transaction-level evidence for each expenditure is exposed in a funder audit regardless. Because the CRA requires disclosure of restricted fund usage on the T3010, gaps in grant records can create compliance issues that surface well after the grant period has closed. The cost of reconstruction after the fact almost always exceeds the cost of doing it correctly from the start.

Grant compliance is a documentation discipline as much as an accounting one. See how Wefinx approaches accounting for non-profits.

← Back to glossary