Legal entities, verification, and financials

One organization can hold several legal registrations — a US 501(c)(3), a registered charity in Kenya, and so on. On Homeward each of those is a legal entity: it carries its own registration ID, verified legal name, board of directors, accreditations, and financial filings. The organization keeps one public identity; the entities hold the accountability record behind it.

Everything in this article lives in the Legal entities section of the organization profile. The entity you select drives the board, accreditations, and filings shown below it.

Adding an entity

Press Add entity and an inline editor row appears with three fields:

• Country — a searchable country select, defaulting to the US. Changing the country clears the registration ID and legal name, because their formats differ per country.
• Registration ID — the identifier in that country’s format. For the US this is the EIN.
• Legal name — for countries other than the US you type this yourself. For the US you leave it: the IRS data supplies the legal name when the EIN is checked.

For a US entity the save button reads Save & verify — saving and checking happen in one step. For other countries the buttons are Save and Cancel.

Each row’s action menu offers Edit, Make primary (hidden on the row that is already primary), and Remove.

Caution

Edit disappears once an entity is verified. A verified entity cannot be edited — the registration ID and legal name are what the IRS confirmed. To correct one, remove it and add it again.

Verification badges

The Verification column shows one of:

Badge	Meaning
Verified 501(c)(3)	The IRS record confirms 501(c)(3) status.
Not 501(c)(3)	The entity exists but is not a 501(c)(3).
Exemption inactive	The entity exists but its tax exemption is not currently active.
Not found	No matching record was found — check the registration ID.
Not verified	The entity has not been checked yet.

When a result exists, an expandable summary row shows the details: Ruling year, Subsection, Exempt status, Contributions deductible (“Yes” for codes 01 and 04, “No” for 02, otherwise “Not reported”), Foundation class, Affiliation, Purposes, NTEE (code and category), Latest tax period, Last checked, and a link to View IRS-derived source record. Anything the source does not report reads Not reported.

After saving a checked entity a Verification complete dialog opens automatically: “We checked the registration and saved this result. Review the details before closing.” It has only a Close button, and Escape is deliberately blocked, so the result is read before it is dismissed. If anything looks incorrect, contact guestrelations@homeward.org.

Board of directors

Each entity has its own board. Member cards show the avatar, the name (or Unknown member), and the board role (Board role not set when empty).

• Add board member takes a Public profile (from the organization’s connected people) and a Board role — both required. The button is disabled with the note No public individual profiles are available yet. until the organization has connected people.

• Board-level fields: Total board members and Term length in years.

• Public member roster chooses how the public sees the board:

  • Yes — names on file — the board is listed by name on the public page.
  • Anonymized — the board size is shown, names are not.
  • Withheld — the board is not shown publicly at all.

A board member must stay in place after publishing: the publish dialog for the organization profile requires at least one.

Accreditations

Each entity can hold accreditations, listed as Name | Verifier | URL | Since. Name is required and is chosen from a curated list of accrediting bodies; a name you type that is not on the list is kept as an extra option. Verifier, URL, and Since (a year) are optional. Empty state: No accreditations yet.

Filings by year

Where the numbers come from: Homeward pulls public nonprofit filings for verified US entities and extracts a set of financial metrics from them. When public data exists, the header strip says so — Building public financial history… while it is being processed, Public financial history is current when it has finished, No matching public nonprofit record when none was found, and Public-data refresh will retry when a fetch failed. It also shows the IRS record line and a Source · ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer / IRS link.

• Add fiscal year creates the next unused year, walking backwards from last year. Year tabs read FY2024, FY2023, and so on.
• Each year shows its Filing (“990 · financial data extracted”, “document only”, or “Entered by organization”) and a Public source link.
• Twelve metrics, all in USD: Total revenue, Total expenses, Total assets, Total liabilities, Net assets, Contributions, Program-service revenue, Investment income, Other revenue, Officer compensation, Other salaries & wages, and Payroll taxes.
• Document links per year: Form 990 URL, Audited financials URL, and Letter from auditor URL. These surface as download links on your public Organization tab.

Overrides

A figure that came from a public filing can be corrected with an override. Clicking the row opens an editor showing “Publicly reported: ”, an override amount, and a required explanation.

Caution

An override never hides the reported figure. The public page shows both — the reported amount and your corrected one — with the explanation you wrote, so readers can see what changed and why. The explanation is public and can be up to 400 characters.

Saving without a note is rejected with “Explain why this value differs from the filing.”; saving without an amount is rejected with “Enter an override value.” Remove override puts the row back to Publicly reported.

Only Total revenue and Total expenses can be entered directly when no public value exists for them. The other metrics are read-only unless a filing supplied a value.

Missing is not zero

Absent figures are shown as unavailable, never as zero — in the dashboard and on the public page. Churches and organizations filing Form 990-N often have no detailed financial return, and an empty cell there means “not reported”, not “$0”.

Removing a year

Per-year deletion is confirmed with a dialog whose wording depends on the source. If the year came from a public filing the button reads Remove organization details — “The public filing and its individual value overrides remain. Organization-entered values and document links for this fiscal year will be removed.” For a year you entered yourself it reads Delete FY — “This removes the whole filing for this fiscal year, including its revenue, expenses, and document links.”

Empty state: No filings on file.

Related

• Building your organization profile — where legal entities sit, and publishing.
• Funds, fundraisers, and receiving — why a verified entity matters for donations.
• Your organization dashboard — the map of every organization page.