How to read a Form 990

The full Form 990 looks intimidating — a dozen-plus pages and a stack of lettered schedules. In practice, a handful of parts carry almost all the useful information. Here's where to look and what each part tells you, whether you're reading The Exodus Road's filing or any other charity's.

Before you start

Confirm you're looking at the right variant — the full Form 990, not the abbreviated 990-EZ or the bare 990-N (see reading the public records for the differences) — and pull two or three consecutive years so you can see trends rather than a single snapshot.

Part I — Summary

The first page is a snapshot: mission statement, number of employees and volunteers, total revenue and expenses for the current and prior year, and net assets at year end. It's a fast way to see the size of the organization and whether revenue and expenses are trending up, down, or holding steady before you dig further.

Part III — Statement of Program Service Accomplishments

The organization describes, in its own words, its largest programs and how much was spent on each. This is where you judge specificity: does the description explain concretely what was done and for whom, with numbers you could in principle verify elsewhere — or is it mostly mission language repeated from the website? Vague program descriptions aren't proof of anything wrong, but specific ones make independent verification easier.

Part VII — Officers, directors, trustees, key employees and highest-compensated employees

A table listing individuals, their titles, average hours per week, and reportable compensation from the organization (and related organizations, if any). This is the starting point for questions about pay — see understanding nonprofit executive pay for how to judge whether a figure here is reasonable rather than simply high or low.

Part IX — Statement of Functional Expenses

Every expense line (salaries, grants, travel, occupancy, and so on) is split into three columns: program services, management & general, and fundraising. Totaling these columns is where the “overhead ratio” comes from — and why it's only ever as good as the allocation choices behind it (see the overhead myth section in evaluating any charity).

Schedule A — Public support test

Public charities (as opposed to private foundations) must show they draw support broadly from the public rather than being effectively controlled by a small number of large donors. Schedule A is the mechanical test for that. It's a governance/funding-structure check, not a quality signal on its own.

Schedule B — Schedule of contributors

Lists large individual contributors. Note that this schedule is often not made public in copies released by the organization or by aggregators, for donor-privacy reasons — don't read its absence as evasive; it's standard practice.

Schedule J — Compensation information

Expands on Part VII with detail on deferred compensation, bonuses, nontaxable benefits, and certain perks (first-class travel, housing allowances, and similar items, if applicable) for top earners. If present, these are worth reading carefully and comparing to the compensation-setting process described in understanding nonprofit executive pay — the existence of a benefit isn't itself a red flag; an undisclosed or unreviewed one would be more concerning.

Schedule O — Supplemental information

A freeform text schedule where organizations explain or expand on answers elsewhere in the form. It's easy to skip, but often contains the plain-English context for numbers that look odd in isolation — check it before concluding something is unexplained.

A disciplined reading process

1. Pull two or three years of filings, not just the most recent;
2. Start at Part I for the size and trend, then Part III for what the money funded;
3. Check Part IX for the functional expense split, and Schedule A for the funding-structure test;
4. Read Part VII and Schedule J for compensation, in context (how to judge it);
5. Check Schedule O for explanations before assuming a number is unexplained;
6. Cross-reference against the organization's own annual report or audited financials if published, and against ratings from the tools in charity rating tools compared.