Accounting Services for Arts & Culture Nonprofits
We help arts organizations prioritize the efficient use of resources.
For over 30 years, arts and culture organizations have trusted YPTC with their accounting and financial management. We help you solve financial problems, so you can let your creativity shine.
Helping Arts and Culture Organizations Thrive
Performing Arts
Close the curtain on having to do it all. Performing arts leaders are often expected to maintain a high level of influence in their communities with limited resources.
To accurately tell the organization’s financial story and fund your creativity, you need the tools, expertise, and financial leadership that a nonprofit performing arts financial expert provides. YPTC offers ongoing and interim accounting and controller/CFO solutions, tailored to your needs and goals.
Museums and Cultural Sites
We help museums, zoos, gardens, and cultural and historical sites of every kind achieve their goals. While you protect, preserve, and share humanity’s treasures, we protect and preserve your treasury so you can share its stories.
For decades, museums have trusted YPTC to provide timely, accurate financials and help them communicate the story those numbers tell to motivate donors. We also support budgeting and forecasting to help you manage timing gaps like curating exhibits ahead of admissions revenue.
Arts Supporting Services and Education
Supporting the arts contributes to a robust and thriving community culture. Whether you are collaborating with local artists, educating future artists, or facilitating artistic endeavors, you need strong financial management, compelling financial narratives, and a diverse funding mix to maximize your impact.
Count on YPTC to handle your accounting, reporting, grant tracking, and compliance so you can focus on your programmatic initiatives.
How We Can Help Your Arts and Culture Organization
Reporting
From the big-picture financial story to the details behind your programs, we develop reports, visuals, and custom dashboards from your financial data that are clear and useful for boards and funders and support better planning and oversight internally. We also help you track key financial statement disclosure information to keep you audit-ready year-round.
Revenue
We help you understand, manage, and diversify the full mix of earned and contributed revenue that enables you to achieve your impact goals. We also track your donor-restricted funds and make sure you comply with the complex revenue recognition and disclosure requirements that apply to arts and culture organizations.
Grant Funding and Management
We provide full lifecycle support for your grant funding efforts, from identifying best-fit opportunities and preparing meticulous, compelling applications to configuring accounting systems and providing ongoing grant reporting support. We can also assist you with cost tracking and recovery, NICRAs, SEFAs, single audit preparation, and more.
Budgeting and Forecasting
Multi-year planning and continuous forecasting can weigh on a small arts and culture team that may not have expertise in financial planning. We support and train your team on budgeting and forecasting best practices and help you manage timing gaps and variable cash flows to keep your programs running smoothly while ensuring financial stability.
Our Nonprofit Accounting Services
We work with nonprofits of all types—including arts and culture organizations. Our team helps nonprofits take charge of their financial management and build a foundation for future success through the following services:
• CFO-level thought partnership
• Accounting, bookkeeping & month-end close
• Financial reporting & analysis
• Interim solutions
• Board meeting attendance & training
• Budgeting & forecasting
• Scenario planning & cash flow management
• Policies & procedures
• Grant proposals, management & reporting
• Audit preparation
• Customized dashboards
• System conversions
Proudly Serving Arts and Culture Clients
For over 30 years, we've been partnering with arts and culture organizations to help them achieve financial success.
Check out a few testimonials from our arts and culture clients:
“I look at the level of service that I get, with people who have significant nonprofit experience. There’s not much in nonprofit accounting that they haven’t seen before. You’ll never find that level of expertise and professionalism for that dollar amount elsewhere."
- Adam Perle, President & CEO, ArtPride New Jersey
"We have been extremely pleased with YPTC’s results and how they provided materials that helped us make a seamless transition to the new auditing firm. They’ve been very professional and have done additional work to address problems immediately when they came up."
- Caro U. Rock, Chairman Emeritus, Chairman of the Board, The Rock School for Dance Education
“I really appreciate YPTC’s ability to use language that makes sense to everybody, from our most sophisticated finance managers to our entry-level people. They inform and empower us without making us feel intimidated."
- Anne Ishii, Executive Director, Asian Arts Initiative
“As an executive director, I have a lot on my plate. I don’t have to keep up to date on the latest news and regulations, knowing that YPTC will stay on top of things. Knowing that there are people in YPTC that I can hand things off to is very valuable.”
- Laura Hortz Stanton, Executive Director, Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts
“As a performing arts organization, we have thousands of transactions related to ticket sales. These all have to [be] reconciled and accounted for. We have systems for doing that but it’s very time-consuming. Our Associate can tap into her network to find other performing arts organizations using the same system to learn the best ways to do reconciliations. The value in that is enormous.”
- Brian Ritter, Executive Director, Mercury Chamber Orchestra
“The reason I was thrilled with YPTC was by having a new person in the office examining all our financial functions and processes with a clear eye, it helped me to decide what worked, what didn’t, and what we needed to change. It gave me a fresh perspective about what we want to do next with the organization.”
- Neil Kutner, Former Interim Managing Director, The Wilma Theater
Meet Our Team
Justine Townsend, Manager and Leader of YPTC's Arts & Culture Specialization
Justine Townsend, CPA, is a lover of the arts and has worked with many arts organizations. She is also an adjunct professor of Financial Management of the Arts for the University of Houston’s Master of Arts Leadership program. She has served in financial leadership roles and as an auditor for nonprofits for over 18 years. Justine uses her in-depth knowledge of nonprofit financial management and passion for service to the arts to help arts organizations achieve their missions.
Additionally, Justine is backed by numerous colleagues at YPTC who are passionate about the arts and have experience helping arts and culture organizations reach their full potential.
