Long Story Short
Most nonprofit leaders come from program backgrounds, not finance, so the numbers are often an afterthought until something becomes a problem. Ting-ting Liang‘s wisdom isn’t to take a class or buy fancier software. It’s to open a spreadsheet and build the budget or cash flow report yourself. If you’re ready to get started, jump to her favorite budget template!
Libby here.
For the first three years I ran Whetstone, we operated without a budget. I’d landed in the CEO seat with exactly zero business experience, and I genuinely didn’t know I needed a budget. Instead, I eyeballed our bank account balance every few days, did some back-of-napkin math to make sure we’d cover payroll, and got back to whatever fire I was fighting.
It didn’t feel all that urgent, honestly. Revenue was growing steadily and my extreme cheapness (I’ve got Nebraska Pioneer DNA, after all) meant we were at pretty low risk of spending more than we brought in.
And then came a year of real growth. We landed a massive school district client and had to staff up before their check arrived. Suddenly I needed to know exactly how many people we could safely hire without running out of cash, and I had nothing that could tell me that. No report, no model, nothing.
I didn’t know how much I didn’t know about our own numbers, until I met someone who wouldn’t let me keep operating that way.
The person who taught me that building the spreadsheet yourself is the point
Around this time, I was in an accelerator program for social enterprises that gave us access to experts across different business disciplines. Urgently needing a budget, I signed up for a slot with a financial consultant named Ting-ting Liang. I still remember the look on her face when I told her we’d been running Whetstone without a budget for three years. Somewhere between confused and deeply concerned.
Ting-ting started her career in investment banking in New York, working in public finance, but left that world because she couldn’t compartmentalize her personal values from her professional ones. She wanted work that actually lined up with what she cared about: racial and economic justice. That search led her to New Orleans, where she’s spent her career doing finance and operations work for organizations in the thick of it — schools, government agencies, youth development and legal aid nonprofits, affordable housing, environmental work.
Ting-ting was a humanities major, not a numbers person by training, and she’s quick to say her interest was never math for its own sake. She’s good at numbers, yes, but her superpower is connection — seeing how one number ripples across the business.
“Finance is like an internal organ,” she says. “It sends money out to fuel the rest of the org, but everything flows back to it – both the good stuff and the bad stuff.” Operations, talent, fundraising – when any one of these is off, the finance organ will know it. It’s a lens through which you can see whether or not your organization is actually working.
That’s the mindset she brought to the budget she eventually helped me to build, and it’s the same lens she uses to help all of her clients — most of whom got into the leadership seat via programs and not finance — to develop their financial fluency.
The Key Takeaway
Because most nonprofit leaders don’t have an accounting degree or MBA, the numbers tend to become someone else’s job. The fix isn’t a finance class or a fancier tool. It’s forcing yourself to open up a spreadsheet and build the thing yourself, whether it’s a multi-year budget, a cash flow report, etc.
Building it yourself (or alongside a very patient numbers person!) is what transforms the numbers from a black box into something you actually understand. Once you can actually see the numbers clearly, you can see trouble (and opportunities!) coming for your team with enough time to do something about it.
Ting-ting’s Process
If you’re a “just get me started” kind of person (aka Helia’s COO Libby), jump to Ting-ting’s favorite templates in the Try it Yourself section and start plugging in your own numbers.
If you’re a “tell me why this works” kind of person (aka our Founder Jess), read on. Here’s what we’re going to cover:
- Step 1 — Build a multi-year budget as a forcing exercise
- Step 2 — Add narrative to every number, so you can trace your own thinking later
- Step 3 — Build your own custom spreadsheet for whatever your system can’t show you
- Step 4 — Review budget vs. actuals on a regular cadence
How These Steps Build Number Fluency
Step 1: Build a multi-year budget — even if it’s wrong
Ting-ting doesn’t wait until an organization is finance-savvy to hand them a budget exercise. She always makes them build one as part of strategic planning, even before they feel ready.
“When you put numbers to things is when you make something concrete,” she says. “It really forces you to be like, okay, what does this actually look like, rolled out in three, four, five years… and it makes you realize how fast the money goes.”
You’re not trying to predict the future — you’re trying to make the future feel real enough that you’d notice if it started going sideways.
That’s not an abstract point for her. She’s watched leaders sit with a grant that sounds enormous — “Oh, we got 10 or 20 million dollars” — and only understand what it actually means once they break it into buckets over a five-year horizon. A million dollars sounds like a lot. Split it across all your full-time employees and it goes fast.
The goal here isn’t accuracy. It’s concreteness. You’re not trying to predict the future — you’re trying to make the future feel real enough that you’d notice if it started going sideways.
Ting-ting recommends the annual budget template from Wallace Foundation (scroll to Compile Your Budget section for Excel template). Plug in your numbers for year 1, then copy the sheet to turn it into a multi-year budget. Pro Tip: Ask AI to help you connect the sheets after all the numbers are plugged in.
Step 2: Add narrative to every number
A budget with no context, Ting-ting says, isn’t actually useful: “Budgets are numbers, but you also need the narrative… budgets where it’s just a bunch of numbers with no context are not very useful.”
Her fix is simple. Whether it’s notes from a board meeting or just a comment in the spreadsheet itself, write down how you arrived at a number, not just the number. “So that you can go back and go, Oh, yeah, this is what I was thinking.”
This is the step that turns a budget from a document you built once into something you can actually use later. Six months from now, you probably won’t remember why you assumed what you assumed. The narrative is what lets you trace your own thinking back.
She’s also had to learn to translate that narrative for non-finance audiences — a PowerPoint slide instead of a spreadsheet dump. “Sometimes you have to take those extra translation steps so it’s not overwhelming to an audience that doesn’t read numbers for a living.”
Step 3: Build your own custom spreadsheet for whatever your system can’t show you
Here’s the part that might be the most freeing: even Ting-ting, a career finance person, doesn’t trust her accounting software to show her everything. “There’s no one accounting system that produces everything I’ve ever needed,” she says. “I’ve always had to create offline spreadsheets for things.”
The clearest example is cash flow. Nonprofit accounting is usually accrual-based, which means it doesn’t line up with what’s actually in the bank. She’s seen an organization go into a cash crisis without initially understanding why. It turned out their grant cycles were seasonal enough to create cash shortfalls so severe that they had to temporarily lay off staff before the funding caught back up.
We ran into this exact problem at Helia — a mismatch between when clients pay and when consultants get paid out led to some really tight weeks. The cash flow report from QuickBooks was not solving it, so we built a custom spreadsheet for that specific gap, not pulled from a template.
The part worth holding onto here: this spreadsheet does not need to be sophisticated. “I hate a spreadsheet where the cells are so complicated you need AI to tell you what it’s doing,” Ting-ting says. Simple and legible beats clever every time, even if that means more rows, not fewer.
I hate a spreadsheet where the cells are so complicated you need AI to tell you what it’s doing.
If you’re using AI to help build it: start with the actual question you’re trying to answer (cash flow timing? multi-year growth? funder tracking?) rather than asking for a generic template, and double-check that the formulas are doing what you think they’re doing before you trust them.
Step 4: Review budget vs. actuals on a regular cadence
The tools only matter if you actually look at them. Ting-ting builds in a regular rhythm (usually quarterly) where the budget gets checked against what actually happened. “Here are things that we projected… How are we doing against these projections.”
This is a pretty standard practice, but it’s one that’s easy to let slip off the calendar when things get busy. If you don’t have a Ting-ting to hold you accountable to it, you need to find someone in the org who will, even if they’re not in finance.
This is where the equity piece of Ting-ting’s philosophy shows up most directly. A leader who can see numbers clearly, early and often, is a leader who can catch a funding cliff, a program that’s not actually scaling, or a cash gap before it turns into layoffs or an all-hands crisis.
Number fluency isn’t just a finance skill at this point — it’s what lets you protect your team.
When to Do This Yourself vs. Bring Someone In
Building the multi-year budget, adding narrative to it, and setting up a simple cash flow tracker — that’s genuinely yours to do. It’ll be rough at first. That’s fine. An AI tool can help you get the formulas started, as long as you check its work rather than trust it blindly.
Consider bringing someone in if:
- Your organization is already in a cash crisis and you need eyes on it immediately, not after you’ve learned to build a spreadsheet
- You’ve just received a major influx of funding (or are scaling fast) and your current systems and skills can’t keep pace with it
- You’re navigating a merger, a major staff transition, or rebuilding financial operations from scratch
- You’re implementing a new accounting system or ERP and need someone to make sure the reporting that comes out of it actually meets your needs
- Your chart of accounts is a mess and you can’t get the data you actually need out of your own books
- You’re managing complex funding streams or tax incentives where a mistake could jeopardize future funding
If You Want Help
Ting-ting Liang helps nonprofits build the financial systems and models that let leadership actually see what’s happening — from a first multi-year budget to a full financial system rebuild during a transition.
She’s a good fit if:
- You’re in a cash flow crisis and need someone to build eyesight into it fast
- You’re scaling quickly and your systems haven’t caught up
- You’re going through a merger, leadership change, or need to rebuild your internal financial operations
- You need someone who can translate the numbers into language your board and program staff can actually use
Connect with Ting-ting!
Try it Yourself
- Annual budget template from Wallace Foundation (scroll to Compile Your Budget section for Excel template)
- Cash flow spreadsheet starter from Nonprofit Finance Fund
Recommended reading:
Questions to Sit With
- Do you know, off the top of your head, how many months of runway you have if funding stalled tomorrow?
- When’s the last time you built a financial document yourself, instead of asking someone else to hand you the summary?
- If you looked at a five-year version of your current budget, broken into people and fixed costs, would the pace surprise you?
- Is there a number in your organization right now that you’ve been avoiding looking at closely?
- Do you have a regular cadence where you check your budget against what actually happened — or does that only happen when something’s already gone wrong?
Not sure Ting-ting‘s the right fit? Talk to Helia directly!
This article comes from a coffee chat with Ting-ting in July 2026. These conversations form the heart of the Helia Library — because we’ve learned the most from doing and from talking with other doers willing to share their wisdom. We don’t need to start from blank pages or do everything alone.
As always, take what’s helpful, leave what’s not, and make it your own.
About Ting-ting
Ting-ting Liang has spent her career doing the unglamorous work of nonprofit finance and operations — from downsizing a state agency after Hurricane Katrina’s FEMA funds wound down, to helping a newly merged affordable housing nonprofit figure out how to run a meeting again, to keeping a renewable energy nonprofit’s tax incentives and solar projects on track today. She was a humanities major, not a math person, and still says her interest was never numbers for their own sake, just what they mean. The phrase “number fluency” actually comes from her own kids’ math homework — she’s been delighted to see it show up in her professional life too.
Work with Ting-ting