Your Form 990 went out on May 15 and the board exhaled. In California that was one filing of four.
The Attorney General wanted Form RRF-1 the same day. The Franchise Tax Board wants its own return, which is not the 990 you already filed. And the Secretary of State has been waiting on a Statement of Information on a two-year cycle that ignores your fiscal year entirely.
That calendar is what nonprofit bookkeeping in Los Angeles has to keep, alongside the books themselves. It is the reason this page exists.
None of this is difficult. It is just easy to be unaware of, and the cost of being unaware is out of proportion to the work. What a California organization needs is a calendar with four dates on it, not one.
Key Takeaways
Here is the recurring California calendar on one screen. Every figure below is taken from the agency’s own published requirements, checked September 2026: the Attorney General’s Registry of Charities and Fundraisers, the Franchise Tax Board, and the Secretary of State.
| Filing | Agency | Who files it | When | Fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Form CT-1 | Attorney General, Registry of Charities and Fundraisers | Organizations holding assets for charitable purposes in California, one time. Entities organized primarily as a hospital, educational institution or religious organization are exempt from registration and annual reporting by law. | Within 30 days of first receiving charitable assets | $50 |
| Form RRF-1 | Attorney General, Registry of Charities and Fundraisers | Every registrant, every year, filed with a copy of the Form 990, 990-EZ or 990-PF you filed with the IRS, or with Form CT-TR-1 if you filed the federal 990-N | Four months and fifteen days after the accounting period ends (May 15 for calendar-year filers). IRS extensions are honored. | $25 to $1,200, by total revenue |
| FTB 199N or Form 199 | Franchise Tax Board | 199N when gross receipts are normally $50,000 or less; Form 199 above that. Private foundations file a complete Form 199 regardless of gross receipts. | 15th day of the 5th month after the tax year closes (May 15 for calendar-year filers) | No filing fee for returns due on or after January 1, 2021 |
| Form SI-100 | Secretary of State | California nonprofit corporations | Within 90 days of registering, then biennially in a filing period made up of the anniversary month of registration and the five months before it | $20 |
| Audited financial statements | Attorney General, under the Nonprofit Integrity Act | Organizations reporting $2 million or more in total revenue. The statute measures gross revenue excluding government grants where the grantor requires an accounting (Gov. Code section 12586(e)(1)). | With the annual RRF-1 renewal | No agency fee; you pay your auditor |
Notice what the second and third rows share: May 15. The state deadline sits on the same day as the federal one, which is what makes it easy to lose. File the 990, feel finished, and the RRF-1 can sit unfiled for a year, then two.
The last row turns on size rather than on which return you file. Under California’s Nonprofit Integrity Act, an organization reporting $2 million or more in total revenue owes audited financial statements with its renewal. That threshold sits inside the range of organizations we work with, so it is worth knowing the year before you cross it rather than the month after.
The RRF-1 itself states the consequence on its first page: failure to submit the report annually may result in the loss of tax exemption and the assessment of a minimum tax of $800, plus interest, and fines or filing penalties. That is the teeth behind a form that takes an afternoon.
Filing the federal 990-N postcard can feel like the end of the year’s paperwork. In California it is the thing that creates more of it.
The rule is worth reading closely, because it is not a revenue test. The Registry says that if your organization is eligible to file, and does file, IRS Form 990-N, then it must file Form CT-TR-1, the Annual Treasurer’s Report, with its RRF-1. If instead you file a Form 990, 990-EZ or 990-PF with the IRS, you send that same return to the Registry and no CT-TR-1 is needed, even if you were eligible for the postcard. What you filed federally decides it.
CT-TR-1 is a short statement of assets, revenue by category and expenses by category. On the tax side, the same organization files FTB 199N, the California e-Postcard, a separate filing from the federal 990-N despite the similar name. Private foundations are the exception there: they file a complete Form 199 no matter how small their gross receipts are.
So a small California organization is looking at a federal return, an RRF-1 with its attachment, a Franchise Tax Board filing, and a Secretary of State statement every other year. That is the group this page is written for.
The monthly work is bookkeeping, but what you actually receive is a set of documents. Naming them is more useful than naming the service:
We prepare for audits. We do not perform them. If your organization needs an audit, a review or a Single Audit, we build the file your auditor works from and answer their questions during fieldwork — the same package described in our audit preparation checklist. The wider set of annual obligations is laid out in our nonprofit compliance checklist.
Our prices are published, with a calculator rather than a call. Monthly bookkeeping is priced by budget size and by how much restricted or grant tracking the work involves, and tax filings are priced per return, separately from bookkeeping. You can see the whole table and work out your own number on the pricing page.
Two things that page will tell you: what the number would be for an organization your size, and the point at which we are not the right answer.
Common questions from small California nonprofits about state filings and monthly bookkeeping.
Yes. They are separate obligations. The Attorney General’s Registry of Charities and Fundraisers requires Form RRF-1 each year, filed together with a copy of the IRS return you actually filed. If you filed Form 990, 990-EZ or 990-PF, send that. If you filed the Form 990-N postcard, file Form CT-TR-1 instead. Filing the federal return alone leaves the state filing open.
No later than four months and fifteen days after the end of your accounting period, which is May 15 for a calendar-year organization. Extensions granted by the IRS for the Form 990 are honored by the Registry.
Registration is required within 30 days of first receiving charitable assets, using Form CT-1 with a $50 fee. Entities organized primarily as a hospital, educational institution or religious organization are exempt from registration by law, and other exemption requests are reviewed case by case. Organizations that discover they were never registered can register now through the Registry’s online filing service, which handles both the initial registration and the annual renewals that follow.
Usually, yes. Organizations with gross receipts normally $50,000 or less may file FTB 199N, the California e-Postcard. Above that threshold the filing is Form 199, due on the 15th day of the 5th month after your tax year closes. Private foundations file a complete Form 199 regardless of gross receipts, and churches and certain religious organizations are outside the Franchise Tax Board filing requirement altogether. Either filing is in addition to the federal 990, not instead of it.
We are based in Sherman Oaks and work with organizations across Los Angeles County, but the work is remote and we serve 501(c)(3) organizations nationwide. What is specific to California is the filing calendar described on this page, which we run for every California client.
Your books and your California filings on one calendar
We keep the monthly books and handle nonprofit bookkeeping and Form 990 preparation for small 501(c)(3) organizations, with the RRF-1 and the California returns filed on the same cycle.
