Home / Resources / Common single audit findings
Updated August 2026
The same handful of problems come up again and again. Most are prevented by a written procedure and a monthly habit, not by spending money.
Charges to a grant that don't meet the cost principles — and within this category, undocumented payroll allocation is one of the most frequently cited issues. Salary charged on a budget percentage with no record of actual effort behind it.
Prevention: document total activity per person, certify it, reconcile it to payroll, adjust when actual diverges from budget.
Spending grant money on something the award doesn't cover — often innocently, when a program shifts and the budget doesn't.
Prevention: keep the award terms where the people spending money can see them, and require a check against them before anything unusual is charged.
Costs incurred outside the approved window. Easy to do at the boundaries, especially with invoices arriving after a grant ends.
Prevention: put start and end dates on the grant record and check invoice dates against them, not just the payment date.
Reports filed late, or figures that don't reconcile to the accounting records.
Prevention: a deadline calendar with reminders weeks ahead, and a habit of tying every reported number back to the books before it goes out.
Buying without the required competition, or paying a vendor who is federally excluded without checking.
Prevention: a written procurement policy with thresholds, and a documented exclusion check for vendors above a stated amount.
If you pass federal money to another organization, you're responsible for overseeing how they use it. Small pass-through entities frequently have no monitoring process at all.
Prevention: a written subaward agreement, a risk assessment, and periodic documented check-ins.
Drawing funds earlier than needed, or holding balances longer than allowed.
Prevention: draw against actual need and keep the calculation.
Almost none of these are about doing the wrong thing. They're about doing the right thing without a record that proves it. In a federal audit, an undocumented control is treated as an absent one — which is good news for a small organization, because writing procedures down is free.
This is general information, not legal or accounting advice. Federal grant rules change and are applied differently by different agencies and auditors. Check with your auditor, your grant officer, or an attorney before relying on any of it.
The Ember tool for thisEmber Staff logs staff time, splits it across grants and programs by actual effort, routes it for supervisor certification, and produces an audit-ready time-and-effort report — with unlimited users on every plan.
Findings cluster in allowable costs, activities allowed or unallowed, period of performance, reporting, procurement, and subrecipient monitoring. Inconsistent or undocumented payroll allocation is consistently among the top few.
Document total activity per employee rather than only grant time, have a supervisor certify it, reconcile to payroll, and adjust when actual effort diverges from budget.
You respond with a corrective action plan describing the cause and the fix. Findings are common; unaddressed repeat findings are what damage a funder relationship.
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Sources: GRF CPAs — Common Findings in Single Audits · The Charity CFO — Top 7 Findings · 2 CFR Part 200 (eCFR). Verified August 2026.