Work

Tools built for the financial reality of movement organizations.

The engagement starts where the story fragments. I sit inside an organization's financial operations, read how accounting and development actually move, and design tools that put them back in lockstep. Slingshot is what that process produced for one organizational profile: a fictional youth organizing nonprofit with a C3/C4 structure and fiscal sponsorship. Your build would start from your structure, not this one.

The Problem

The financial operations gap that the sector keeps ignoring.

Most movement organizations run their financial operations on tools designed for conventional nonprofit accounting, or adapted from corporate platforms, neither built for the specific complexity of fiscally sponsored movement organizations with dual-entity structures. The result is workflows that bend around platform limitations rather than platforms that serve the work.

Add the complexity of fiscal sponsorship, C3/C4 dual-entity structures, multi-year grant tracking, and the cash vs. accrual gap that most staff never get clear guidance on, and the finance function becomes a bottleneck rather than an intelligence hub.

I have run these systems from inside. The finance seat sees what leadership typically does not: grant lifecycle patterns that telegraph which funders will renew and which will quietly disappear, budget variance as an early organizational signal, compliance records as a core layer of institutional memory around financial and regulatory risk. That is direct experience, not sector analysis. The tools most organizations depend on were not built to surface any of it, and the platforms they run on quietly capture organizational knowledge for corporate models instead of returning it to the mission. Data sovereignty is the architectural response to that capture.

01
Cash vs. accrual reconciliation
Fiscal sponsors often report to projects on a cash basis. Federal grants and audited financials require accrual. Most finance staff are reconciling two sets of numbers with no system built for the gap.
02
Multi-year grant complexity
Multi-year grants create accrual recognition schedules that rarely match cash payment timing. Payment pipelines, reporting deadlines, and compliance requirements pile up with no dedicated tracking.
03
C3/C4 compliance burden
Dual-entity organizations must track staff time allocation and cost sharing, lobbying expenditures against applicable limits, and the line between advocacy and political campaign intervention. Across every transaction, every month.
04
Platform lock-in and data exposure
The tools most organizations use were not designed for movement work. They extract organizational knowledge, create vendor dependency, and adapt the work around the platform rather than the other way around.
What one engagement looks like

Slingshot: two MIAgents designed around one organization's financial reality.

Slingshot is the name for the pair and the shared architecture underneath them. MIAgent Solar holds the development side: grant lifecycle, payment timing, compliance, funder reporting. MIAgent Lunar holds the accounting side: program budgets, GL mapping, monthly actuals, fiscal sponsor reconciliation. They share one data layer because the story an organization tells its funders, its community, and its own leadership only holds together when those two functions move in lockstep.

Each agent surfaces risks, models scenarios, and drafts output shaped for the audience receiving it. I designed Slingshot from inside the finance and operations seat, not by studying it from outside. Your organization's structure is different. Your build would be too. See additional MIAgents on the Tools page, each scoped to a different operational problem. The argument behind these tools is written out in full.

MIAgent Solar

The development side. Grant lifecycle, payments, compliance, funder reporting.

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MIAgent Lunar

The accounting side. Program budgets, GL mapping, monthly actuals, reconciliation.

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Prototype with simulated data. Explore freely See additional MIAgents →
How it was built

From problem to prototype.

01
The problem

Movement organizations were being forced into accounting software designed for enterprises, while accounting and development sat in separate systems that did not speak to each other. The result: two functions that should have been in lockstep telling one story were instead reconciling spreadsheets and missing the larger picture entirely.

02
The architecture decision

Build two MIAgents that share one data layer. Your MIAgent Lunar covers the accounting reality: C3/C4 splits, fiscal sponsor reconciliation, GL structure, monthly actuals. Your MIAgent Solar covers the development reality: grant lifecycle, payment schedules, funder-specific compliance, funder reporting. Same organization, same numbers, two lenses that finally agree.

03
What it proves

When the accounting and development functions are wired together and made legible to organizational leaders, the organization unlocks its own voice. Resource stewardship, impact tracking, and funder reporting stop being three different conversations. Solar and Lunar show what becomes possible when tools are designed around how the org actually operates. Purpose-built, tractable, and owned by the organization.

Three commitments, not three features

What shaped Slingshot, and what could not be negotiated.

Three commitments shaped every decision in Slingshot. None of them are features. Features get added and removed. These are constraints that could not be traded away without the tool becoming something else. Each one answers a question the sector has been avoiding.

01
Data Sovereignty
Whose models learn from your organization? In Slingshot, your organizational data is never used to train external models. Grant histories, budget patterns, funder relationships, and compliance records stay inside the infrastructure you control, processed through API providers bound by contractual commitments not to train on your data, with network-isolated deployment available for organizations that require it. The full treatment of why this is a structural commitment instead of a policy preference is on the Tools page and in the Philosophy section.
02
Adaptive Infrastructure
Who adapts to whom? Slingshot adapts to how movement organizations with fiscal sponsors actually work, not how enterprise software imagines they work. Your GL structure, your reporting cycles, your grant portfolio, your funder mix. The tool moves to match the shape of the organization, not the other way around.
03
Collective Intelligence
Who can read what the organization knows? Slingshot wires the accounting and development sides together and presents what they say in language an organizational leader can read without a translator. The strategic intelligence the finance seat has been holding for years finally becomes legible to the people making the decisions that depend on it.
Who this is built for

The people who already carry the story.

Slingshot is shaped around three audiences inside the organization.

Organizational Leaders
You need the full financial picture without waiting for someone to translate it. Slingshot makes the accounting and development functions legible to you directly, so resource decisions, funder conversations, and board reporting draw from one coherent narrative.
Finance and Operations Staff
You hold more strategic intelligence than the organization typically accesses. Slingshot gives you tools shaped around your actual GL structure, your reporting cycles, and your fiscal sponsor relationship instead of forcing your work into software designed for someone else.
Development Staff
You need the accounting side and the development side to tell the same story. Slingshot wires grant lifecycle, payment timing, and funder reporting to the same data layer the accounting team uses, so compliance, reporting, and stewardship speak with one voice.

Want to see this built for your organization?

The demos use a fictional organization. The problems they address are real. If your organization is navigating fiscal sponsorship, dual-entity compliance, or multi-year grant complexity, let's talk about what a tailored engagement could look like for you.

Book a scoping conversation