How a nonprofit reclaimed time for its mission

Reducing HR administrative burden for a lean nonprofit

Building a business the How one CFO got closer to getting it right by getting support with human resources administration from a full-service partner right way 

Adam Gold runs the numbers for a New York City nonprofit that has spent more than forty years working on affordable housing, and on most days he runs a good deal more than that. He’s the chief financial officer, so accounting, banking, the audit, taxes, budgeting, and financial reporting all sit with him. So does human resources: hiring, benefits, and every personnel question that comes up across a staff of about thirty. “It’s never, ever boring,” he says of a small shop where everyone wears several hats, and where he’ll look up from his desk wondering why he’s hungry, only to find it’s already past one in the afternoon.

He’s proud of what the organization does. It helps create new affordable housing, guides developers through the tax incentives that make those projects viable, runs compliance for the housing lotteries that reserve apartments at reduced rents, and rehabilitates distressed buildings. A homeownership education program walks first-time buyers through everything renting never taught them. Gold wants the people doing this work to feel they can become anything they set out to. His door is always open, which, as he puts it, is probably why he’s so busy.

The challenge

When human resources becomes too much for one person

Before partnering with Insperity, human resources at this nonprofit was work with no fixed boundaries, the kind that sprawled into everything and never quite finished. Hiring alone meant background checks, back-and-forth scheduling, onboarding paperwork, and setting up a new hire’s systems and phone before they could start. “It’s just a very, very time-consuming process,” Gold says. On their own, each of these tasks was minor. Together, they pulled hours away from the work he was actually there to do: the budget, the audit, the financials. Compliance worried him most. He ran HR for the whole organization by himself, with no one to double-check his work or flag a missed detail. Payroll, for example, came down to where each person lived. Some colleagues lived in New Jersey, others across the five boroughs, and each address changed how taxes and withholdings were calculated. “Who would have time for that realistically?” Gold says of remitting it all by hand. By his reckoning, no one who’s being straight about it. Each year arrived with new rules stacked on the old ones. Mandated sick time for part-timers, protected hours to vote on election day, the requirements related to parental leave to having a private space to express milk: none of it had existed in its current shape years earlier, and all of it landed on whoever ran HR. For an organization this size the exposure built quietly, and a single missed requirement could carry real cost. 

The decision

Choosing a full-service HR partner

When Gold decided to bring in outside help, he approached it deliberately, the way he approaches everything. “I like to make conscious decisions,” he says. “I like to give thoughtful responses.” He saw the risk early, before it became something he’d be cleaning up after, and he went looking for a way to manage it. Once he concluded the organization needed a professional employer organization, he weighed Insperity against the requirements he was looking for and found it covered the whole list. Medical coverage tipped the decision. A thirty-person nonprofit can’t assemble group health, dental, and vision on its own, and gaining access to a real benefits network, in his words, hit it out of the park. Underneath the economics sat a standard he wouldn’t compromise. He wanted clean audits and everything done correctly and legally, because he was, as he puts it, trying to do the right thing. The Insperity team that first brought the organization on became people he still counts as colleagues more than a decade later.

The solution

What the Insperity® HR360 solution helped put in place

The organization moved its HR onto the Insperity® HR360 solution, the full-service solution that helps manage many of the day-to-day HR administrative responsibilities, while leaving Gold in control of key business decisions. Multi-state payroll and tax filing came off his desk first. The Insperity benefits package offered a real choice for employees: four health plans, two higher deductible and two lower, plus dental, vision, and an employee assistance program that gives staff somewhere to turn for mental health support. “Our employees are able to access a choice of four health plans,” Gold says, “options they wouldn’t be able to have if we didn’t have Insperity.” Beyond payroll and benefits, Insperity® HR360 also takes care of the routine work at both ends of someone’s time on staff. Onboarding and offboarding now follow clear checklists, so a new hire’s tax setup and a departing employee’s paperwork get handled correctly rather than pieced together each time. The partnership adds perks on top: the Insperity MarketPlace gives staff discounts on everything from auto and renters insurance to retail items and services. Staff training and development is strong, too. Gold rates the available training as high as a major corporation’s, and he takes more of it than anyone else at the organization, from Excel courses to a personal brand session called Building Brand You.

The partnership

Expert HR guidance and an experienced HR professional on call 

Gold describes the working relationship in a single word: collaborative. “I’m responsible. They’re responsible,” he says. “Usually it’s them bringing me in the loop about something.” That early warning matters most when a new law is on its way and the staff fall under it because of where they live and work. He hears about it in time to act, and even when he’s already caught wind of a change, he wants Insperity’s read as a second source. That same backup matters most whenever something upends normal operations. During COVID for example, Insperity provided timely HR guidance and best-practices direction instead of leaving him to piece it together from the news: where to mark six feet of distance on the floor, when to station a thermometer at the entrance, how to keep a small staff safe. Any leader meets moments like that – a sudden HR regulation, an employment-law change that arrives with little notice – and in each one Insperity provides assistance so a one-person HR department isn’t improvising under pressure. When a problem is complicated or carries real stakes, Gold has an experienced HR professional to consult instead of having to guess at policy questions. “It’s sort of like the colleague that I can’t have in-house,” he says. In a perfect world he’d staff one person for accounting, another for HR, and several more besides, but a nonprofit’s budget doesn’t stretch that far. The partnership gives him that HR expertise whenever a question comes up, without hiring for it.

The results

Time back, greater accuracy, and lower risk 

Gold is direct about what matters most to him. “Sharing the responsibility,” he says, “raises accuracy and brings the organization closer to getting everything right.” For a CFO who lives for clean audits, that’s the payoff he was after. He can measure another part of it in headcount. The work Insperity takes on, from benefits to onboarding/offboarding employees, to tracking HR-related compliance, would otherwise demand one or two more full-time people. As a CFO, Gold has run the math. With a team of thirty, that’s real capacity, time and salary he can put back into the mission. The benefits pay off in retention as well, keeping good people on staff for years.