Free tool · for nonprofit treasurers and boards, and congregations of any tradition — church, mosque, synagogue or temple
Free Nonprofit Operating-Reserve Check
This free calculator works out your months of cash on hand on unrestricted cash only: it takes every restricted balance out of your total cash first, then divides what is left by your monthly operating cost. That is how it works out an operating reserve, and it answers one question — how many months could your organization keep going on the money it is actually allowed to spend? A grant for the food program, a capital gift for the roof, a gift designated for next year and last week's general giving all land in the same account, and the balance adds them up. List each fund, mark it restricted, board-designated or unrestricted, and enter what it holds. It ships pre-filled with a worked example, so it computes a real answer before you type anything.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the files.
What it does
- Subtracts every restricted balance from your total cash before it computes anything, so a grant sitting in the general account never counts as money you can spend.
- Returns your months of cash on hand — months of runway — on unrestricted cash only, scored against a reserve target you set yourself, not a sector standard and not a regulator's threshold.
- Works for any tradition. The five restriction classes are fixed because the formulas match on them; the fund names are entirely yours, so a mosque, a synagogue, a temple, a gurdwara and a church all use it without renaming anything inside a formula.
- Lists your funds one row each — name, restriction class from a dropdown, and the balance it holds today — and marks each one spendable or not from the class you picked.
- Asks for three numbers under the table, beyond the fund list itself: your total cash across every account, your monthly operating cost, and the runway target your board wants to hold.
- Shows a second runway figure as well: what the runway becomes if the balances your board has designated stay untouched, so releasing one becomes a visible decision rather than a quiet habit.
- Flags the cash your fund list does not account for, so a fund missing from the list shows up instead of quietly inflating the answer.
- Ships pre-filled with an invented ten-fund example — $92,000 in the bank, $51,800 of it restricted, $40,200 of unrestricted operating cash against $9,500 a month, which is 4.2 months rather than the 9.7 the bank balance suggests.
- Holds sixteen funds in all — the ten worked examples plus six spare rows, so replace the examples with your own rather than adding alongside them.
- Clearing an example takes deleting three cells — its name, class and balance — with the computed columns left alone.
- No macros, no signup, and nothing you type leaves your own file.
Related reading
Own it, don't rent it
Knowing your runway is not the same as knowing what a program costs
This free sheet proves the principle on numbers you type in. The full kit is six finished Ardent Workshop products — grant tracking, congregation operations, volunteer scheduling, household giving records, board and volunteer policies, and grant-writing templates — plus a ten-tab Operations Control Panel, of which this sheet is a stripped-back version of one tab. The panel computes the same runway with every balance traced back to the file it came from — the grant tracker, the giving log — so each figure names its own source instead of sitting in a cell unexplained. It checks each fund's committed spend against what it still holds, and flags the funds with more promised out of them than is left in them. It works out what a program costs once volunteer time and a share of the building are counted, and turns that into the indirect-cost rate most grant budgets ask you for — with the sentence explaining its basis. And it builds the one-page monthly packet for the board.
A one-time purchase you keep and reuse — files you own outright, not a monthly subscription to somebody's donor platform.
An operating framework, not accounting, tax, legal or compliance advice, and not a substitute for your own IRS or state charitable-registration obligations. Nothing here decides whether a gift is restricted — that is the purpose it was given or raised for, and your own records. The pre-filled example is illustrative and every fund, funder and figure in it is invented; the reserve target is yours to set, not a published standard. Free to use; please don't resell or redistribute.