Fiscal Sponsor Organizations

We used to have liaisons do this, and it was helpful for understanding project activities as well as assisting, when needed, with tracking down relevant documentation. Now, our Program Manager and/or Director review & approve requests (Director is added over a certain $ amount). Shifting the review burden to higher-level employees (though still project-facing staff) was an attempt to centralize the work, rather than having each liaison have to log in for approvals for their particular projects.

In both flows, a finance employee approves first to ensure the selected grant can be used toward the expense and that there are funds available. Additionally, our finance director or ED have an extra level of review (I believe) when the expense is over an even higher $ threshold.

In typing this out I’m wondering if other orgs have a similar oversight process or if we may have too many cooks!

As a very small fiscal sponsor, we do a ‘three-stage’ approval. 1. The project’s primary contact must submit the expense with required documentation through our system*. 2. One of our two officers will review and approve (or send back for whatever reason) the expense. 3. The other officer will make the actual payment.

For petty-cash and other preapproved expenditures, we preload debit cards based on a submitted expense budget, and collect receipts against that budget.


*systems-wise, we are moving all payment processing to Mazlo, but still have our old process in place which uses airtable.

I’m working on a homemade system (using a no-code environment called Coda) where projects can choose a governance system (e.g., majority, 1-person, 2-person, consent, consensus - really almost as complex as they want) to approve expenses. Still a work in progress, though! And then after project committee approval, it then goes to a member of our team for review, with a second (senior) review for expenses over some threshold (not yet determined)