When “Relief” Comes with Fine Print: Inside the New Single Audit Threshold

Every nonprofit finance director used to know the number by heart: $750,000. Cross it in federal spending during a fiscal year, and a Single Audit was coming your way. That number held steady for nearly thirty years, until, in April 2024, the Office of Management and Budget raised it to $1 million. Taken at face value this is a win: fewer organizations will trigger a Single Audit at all, but for all those still spending above $1 million, the compliance and documentation demands haven’t eased up. In some ways, they’ve gotten trickier.

Two Rulebooks, One Fiscal Year

The change kicks in for fiscal years starting on or after October 1, 2024, meaning most organizations will first feel it in fiscal years closing September 30, 2025 or later. The new $1 million threshold thus only applies to awards issued on or after October 1, 2024. Anything issued before that date still falls under the old $750K-era guidance. The unfortunate result is that a lot of organizations are now tracking two versions of the Uniform Guidance simultaneously, sometimes within a single fiscal year, sometimes across the same set of programs.

This creates a tracking problem with real audit exposure. Finance teams need a system that flags which rules apply to which award, sorted by issue date, and they need to produce that evidence the moment a reviewer asks. Universities, health centers, human services agencies, and multi-program nonprofits juggling federal, state, and private grants across several locations are the ones feeling this most acutely.

The Invoice Is Where Compliance Really Happens

Grant compliance gets discussed at the leadership level, but it’s executed at the invoice level.  The burden doesn’t sit with the CFO in the abstract, but with accounts payable, the department actually spending, coding, and eventually defending every federal dollar. Every bill tied to a federal award has to be coded to the right grant, fund, and program. Expenses that span multiple funding sources or locations have to be split correctly. Each of those decisions also needs an accurate paper trail that holds up under scrutiny.

Traditionally, these complex operations were recorded by hand in Excel sheets, but this is exactly where manual processes tended to fail as data transferred across email approval chains gets lost or corrupted, spreadsheets bolted onto the general ledger and ad hoc coding fail to integrate with the rest of the process. Information is not lost because people are not doing their jobs, the fact is they are using processes that were not built for audit-grade documentation. It’s also exactly the gap PairSoft’s integration with Blackbaud is designed to close.

A Native Integration, Not a Bolt-On

Most AP automation tools treat nonprofit fund accounting as an add-on feature, layered onto software that was not built with grants in mind. By contrast, PairSoft’s connection to Blackbaud’s Financial Edge NXT operates inside the Financial Edge NXT environment itself, so invoicing, approvals, and fund coding all happen in the system finance teams are already using, saving staff from constantly toggling between platforms.

For organizations running multiple locations, programs, and grants at once, that matters because allocation happens the moment an invoice is captured, not weeks later during a reconciliation scramble. A single invoice for shared facility costs, split across three grant-funded programs at two locations, gets coded to the right funds immediately, with the relevant documentation attached and ready to produce on demand.

Not All That Glitters

The threshold increase was presented as a relief, and for many organizations, it is. But for those still managing overlapping awards under two sets of rules, it’s really a signal to tighten documentation practices now, before an audit forces the issue. AP automation purpose-built for Financial Edge NXT builds that readiness in by default.