Last updated 2026-07-24
TL;DR
Form 990-EZ is for nonprofits with gross receipts under $200,000 and total assets under $500,000. Above those numbers, you file the full Form 990. Under $50,000 in gross receipts, most small booster clubs and PTOs file the 990-N postcard instead of either one. Check current thresholds at irs.gov before you file.
What is Form 990, exactly?
Form 990 is the annual information return that most tax-exempt organizations file with the IRS. It's not a tax bill in the usual sense (most filers owe nothing), it's a disclosure document. The IRS uses it to check that a nonprofit is still behaving like a nonprofit, and the public can use it to see how the organization spends its money. The IRS describes the 990 series plainly: "Tax-exempt organizations, nonexempt charitable trusts, and section 527 political organizations file this form to provide the IRS with the information required by section 6033" [1]. That's the legal hook. Section 6033 of the tax code is what requires most exempt organizations to file something every year, and the 990 family (990, 990-EZ, 990-N, 990-PF) is how the IRS sorts filers by size and type. If your booster club, PTO, or youth sports league has federal tax-exempt status (usually 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4)), you almost certainly have to file one version of the 990 every year, even if you never got a formal letter reminding you. Skip it three years running and the IRS revokes your exempt status automatically, no warning letter required beyond the filing deadline itself [2]. If that's already happened to your group, that's a separate problem with its own fix. For background on the base form, see form 990 and irs form 990.
990 vs 990-EZ: what's the actual difference?
| Gross receipts normally ≤ $50,000 | Form 990-N (e-Postcard) [3] | |
|---|---|---|
| Gross receipts < $200,000 AND total assets < $500,000 | Form 990-EZ (or full 990 if you prefer) [4] | |
| Gross receipts ≥ $200,000 OR total assets ≥ $500,000 | Form 990 (full form) [4] | |
| Private foundations (any size) | Form 990-PF | Notice that word "or" in that third row. It trips people up constantly. A small booster club with $120,000 in gross receipts but $550,000 sitting in an endowment or reserve account from a decade of fundraising doesn't qualify for the EZ. Total assets alone can bump you up to the full 990, even if your annual cash flow looks modest. The IRS instructions for Form 990-EZ spell out both thresholds and note the return "is used by organizations exempt from income tax" that meet both the gross receipts and total assets tests for the tax year [4]. One more wrinkle: you're always allowed to file the full Form 990 even if you qualify for the EZ or the N. Nobody does this by choice for a 12-person volunteer PTO, but if your board wants extra transparency for a big donor or grant application, it's an option. |
The difference comes down to size, mostly measured by gross receipts and total assets, not by what kind of organization you are. Both forms ask for the same basic categories of information (revenue, expenses, program accomplishments, governance), but the EZ version is shorter and asks for less detail in each section. Here's the breakdown the IRS uses to sort filers among the three most common thresholds: | Filing situation | Form required |
What is the 990-N, and how is it different from 990-EZ?
Form 990-N, nicknamed the e-Postcard, is for organizations whose gross receipts are normally $50,000 or less [3]. It's not really a form at all, it's a short online submission through the IRS's electronic filing system, and it asks for maybe eight pieces of information: your EIN, tax year, legal name, address, confirmation you're still under the $50,000 threshold, and a couple of yes/no questions. This is where most small booster clubs, PTOs, and single-team youth sports groups actually land. If your group's total revenue for the year, concessions, fundraisers, registration fees, sponsorships, all of it combined, comes in under $50,000, you almost certainly file the 990-N, not the EZ and not the full 990. There's no financial detail requested, no balance sheet, no listing of expenses by category. The catch: "normally" $50,000 isn't a hard annual cutoff. The IRS averages gross receipts over a rolling period for organizations in their first few years or with fluctuating income, so a group that clears $55,000 one year because of an unusually good silent auction might still qualify for the N depending on prior years' averages. If you're close to the line, this is exactly the kind of thing to confirm with the IRS rather than guess. See 990n and form 990-n for the filing mechanics.
Which form does a small booster club or PTO actually file?
For the overwhelming majority of booster clubs, PTOs, and youth sports league treasurers reading this, the answer is Form 990-N. Most volunteer-run parent groups don't clear $50,000 in gross receipts in a year. Concession stand sales, a few fundraisers, some sponsorship checks from local businesses, it adds up, but it rarely hits six figures unless you're running a large multi-team program or a booster club supporting an entire high school athletic department. If your group is bigger, a football booster club funding uniforms, buses, and facility upgrades for a whole program, or a PTO at a large elementary school running a $150,000 annual fund drive, you're more likely looking at the 990-EZ. And if you've got real assets on the books (a building, a large reserve fund, significant equipment), check the total assets threshold carefully, because that's the number that quietly pushes groups into full 990 territory. A rough gut check: add up every dollar that came into the organization's bank accounts in the fiscal year, before subtracting any expenses. That's your gross receipts figure. Gross receipts is a bigger number than net income, and it's the one the IRS cares about here, not your profit after covering the cost of goods sold at the concession stand.
What does a treasurer do?
A treasurer is the person responsible for tracking, safeguarding, and reporting an organization's money. In a volunteer group like a booster club or PTO, that usually means keeping the checkbook (or the online banking login), recording every deposit and expense, reconciling the bank statement every month, and making sure the group files whatever it owes the IRS and the state on time. It's a real job with real consequences if it's ignored. Treasurers who inherit a shoebox of receipts from last year's volunteer, or who take over after a multi-year gap in bookkeeping, are dealing with the most common failure mode in this world: nobody filed anything for three years, and now the IRS has auto-revoked the group's exempt status. The day-to-day list is shorter than people expect: pay bills, deposit cash from fundraisers (ideally with two people counting it), reconcile the bank account monthly, keep receipts, prepare a simple budget vs. actual report for board meetings, and file the annual 990 (or EZ, or N) by the deadline, which is the 15th day of the 5th month after your fiscal year ends [1]. For a July-to-June fiscal year, that's November 15.
What does a club treasurer do differently from a corporate one?
A club treasurer, whether for a booster club, PTO, or youth sports league, wears more hats than a corporate finance person because the whole organization is usually one or two volunteers deep. There's no separate bookkeeper, no accounts payable clerk, no internal audit department. The treasurer often is the entire finance function. That means the club treasurer role blends bookkeeping (recording transactions), controls (making sure two people touch cash from fundraisers, not one), compliance (filing the 990 series and any state charitable registration), and reporting (telling the board and parents where the money went). In a corporate setting those are four different job titles. The stakes are also different in a specific way: a corporate treasurer's mistakes usually show up in an audit finding. A club treasurer's mistakes show up as an IRS revocation letter, or worse, a state investigation into missing raffle proceeds, because there's rarely a second set of eyes checking the work in real time. That's exactly why handoff documentation between outgoing and incoming treasurers matters so much in this world; most disasters trace back to a gap where nobody was watching the books at all.
What information does Form 990 or 990-EZ actually ask for?
Both forms cover the same ground, just at different depths. Expect to report: total revenue broken into categories (contributions, program service revenue, fundraising event income, membership dues), total expenses (program, management, fundraising), a balance sheet snapshot (assets, liabilities, net assets), a description of your mission and biggest program accomplishments for the year, and a list of officers, directors, and key employees, even if nobody draws a salary. The full Form 990 adds several schedules depending on your activities: Schedule A for public charity status, Schedule G if you had fundraising events or gaming (bingo, raffles) over certain thresholds, Schedule L for transactions with insiders, and others. The 990-EZ has its own shorter set of required schedules but still asks for Schedule A and, if applicable, Schedule G. One thing that surprises new treasurers: even the 990-N asks whether the organization is still under the $50,000 threshold and whether it has "terminated or gone out of business." It sounds trivial, but answering it wrong (or filing late for three straight years) is what triggers automatic revocation.
What happens if you file the wrong form, or don't file at all?
Filing the wrong-sized form for your organization generally isn't a disaster by itself. If you file a full 990 when a 990-EZ would have worked, you've just done extra paperwork; the IRS doesn't penalize you for over-disclosing. The real risk runs the other direction: filing a 990-N when your gross receipts actually exceeded $50,000, or filing a 990-EZ when your total assets crossed $500,000. That can mean an incomplete return, which the IRS may treat as not filed at all. The bigger and far more common problem is not filing anything. The Pension Protection Act of 2006 added the automatic revocation rule: an organization that fails to file the required 990-series return for three consecutive years automatically loses its tax-exempt status, effective as of the filing due date for the third year, with no appeal for the missed years themselves [2]. The IRS maintains a searchable Tax Exempt Organization Search tool where you can check whether a specific EIN has been auto-revoked [5]. Recovering from auto-revocation means filing Form 1023 or 1023-EZ for reinstatement, along with any delinquent returns, and in many cases paying a user fee. The IRS's Revenue Procedure on this (Rev. Proc. 2014-11) lays out streamlined retroactive reinstatement for organizations that apply within 15 months of the revocation date, if they meet the requirements [6]. Outside that window, retroactive reinstatement gets harder and the group may lose exempt status for the gap period, meaning any donations received during that time might not have been tax-deductible for the donor. This is exactly the kind of situation where it's worth a plain conversation with a CPA or tax attorney who works with nonprofits; the fix is doable but has real deadlines attached.
How do gross receipts and total assets actually get calculated?
Gross receipts, for 990 purposes, means the total amount your organization received from all sources during the year, before subtracting any costs or expenses. If your booster club sold $30,000 worth of concessions but spent $18,000 on the food and supplies, your gross receipts figure is $30,000, not the $12,000 profit. This trips people up because it feels backwards from how you'd think about your "real" fundraising haul. Total assets is a balance sheet number: cash on hand, money in checking and savings, any investments, equipment, and property, all added up at the end of your fiscal year, regardless of whether you owe money against any of it. A booster club with $40,000 in a savings account earmarked for a future scoreboard has $40,000 in assets sitting on that line even though the money is spoken for. Because both numbers use gross figures rather than net figures, small groups often overestimate which form they need. Run the actual math before assuming you've outgrown the 990-N or the EZ. For a deeper look at how the numbers flow into the return itself, see 990 tax form and [990](/articles/treasurer-basics/990).
Do state filing requirements add anything on top of the IRS forms?
Usually yes, and this is the part treasurers miss most often. Filing your 990-series return with the IRS satisfies federal requirements, but most states with charitable solicitation laws require a separate annual registration or renewal, sometimes with its own financial reporting, sometimes just a short form and a fee. Requirements vary widely by state, by how much money you raise, and by whether you solicit donations from the public versus just collecting dues from members. Some states exempt small PTOs and booster clubs below a certain revenue threshold; others don't distinguish by size at all. Because this changes by state and by year, confirm the current requirement with your state's charity registration office or attorney general's office rather than assuming last year's rule still applies. If your group runs raffles, bingo nights, or other gaming as a fundraiser, that usually triggers a separate state gaming or raffle license requirement on top of any charitable solicitation registration, and it may also require reporting the gaming income on Schedule G of your federal 990 or 990-EZ if it crosses certain dollar thresholds.
How do you know which form to file this year?
Start with last year's return, if one exists, and check whether your gross receipts and total assets crossed either threshold since then. Groups don't usually jump categories overnight, but a big capital campaign, a large bequest, or a jump in registration fees can push a group from the 990-N bracket into 990-EZ territory in a single year. A quick decision process: pull your total deposits for the fiscal year (that's gross receipts, before expenses). Pull your year-end balance sheet total (that's total assets). If gross receipts are at or under $50,000, you're very likely a 990-N filer. If gross receipts are between $50,000 and $200,000 and total assets stay under $500,000, you're a 990-EZ candidate. If either gross receipts hit $200,000 or total assets hit $500,000, you're looking at the full Form 990. This is one of the places a state-personalized setup helps, because your state's charity registration rules layer on top of whichever federal form you land on, and the combination is different in every state. Boosterledger's $99 one-time Treasurer Kit Builder builds out the specific IRS and state filing checklist for your situation so you're not reverse-engineering it from IRS instructions PDFs at 11pm before a deadline. It's not a substitute for a CPA on anything complicated, but it covers the common cases well.
What does a treasurer of a club actually do day to day, month to month, year to year?
Day to day: deposit any cash or checks received (ideally within a few days, never sitting in someone's car for weeks), record every transaction in whatever system the club uses (spreadsheet, QuickBooks, Wave), and keep receipts for every expense. Month to month: reconcile the bank statement against your records, report a simple income/expense summary to the board, and flag anything that looks off before it becomes a bigger problem. Two-person cash counts after every fundraiser or concession stand shift belong in this bucket too; it's not about distrust, it's about protecting the volunteer counting the money from being the only person who can be blamed if a number is off. Year to year: prepare and file the correct 990-series return by the deadline (15th day of the 5th month after fiscal year end) [1], renew any state charitable registration, renew any raffle or gaming license, and hand off a clean set of books and passwords to the next treasurer when your term ends. That last part, the handoff, is where most small nonprofits quietly fall apart. A treasurer who keeps good records but never documents where the login credentials, EIN, and filing history live has set up the next person to fail through no fault of their own.
Frequently asked questions
What is Form 990?
Form 990 is the annual information return most tax-exempt organizations file with the IRS under section 6033 of the tax code. It reports revenue, expenses, assets, and governance details. There are several versions (990, 990-EZ, 990-N, 990-PF) sorted by organization size, and filing the correct one keeps your tax-exempt status active [1].
What is a 990 tax form used for?
It's used by the IRS to monitor whether a tax-exempt organization is still operating consistent with its exempt purpose, and by the public to see how a nonprofit raises and spends money. It isn't a tax bill for most filers; it's a disclosure and compliance document required annually.
What's the difference between 990 and 990-EZ?
Form 990-EZ is for organizations with gross receipts under $200,000 and total assets under $500,000 for the tax year. Organizations above either threshold must file the full Form 990, which asks for more detail and additional schedules [4].
What is a treasurer?
A treasurer is the officer responsible for an organization's money: tracking income and expenses, safeguarding cash, reconciling accounts, and making sure required filings (like the 990 series) go in on time. In small nonprofits, the treasurer often handles bookkeeping single-handedly.
What does a treasurer do in a club?
A club treasurer deposits and records money, pays bills, reconciles the bank account monthly, reports finances to the board, files the annual 990-series return with the IRS, and often handles state charitable registration or raffle licensing too.
Do PTOs and booster clubs have to file a 990?
Yes, if the organization has federal tax-exempt status. Most small groups file the simplified 990-N if gross receipts are $50,000 or less annually [3]. Failing to file any 990-series return for three straight years triggers automatic revocation of exempt status [2].
What happens if my nonprofit's status got auto-revoked?
You'll need to file Form 1023 or 1023-EZ for reinstatement plus any delinquent 990 returns. If you apply within 15 months of the revocation date, streamlined retroactive reinstatement may be available under Rev. Proc. 2014-11; after that window it gets harder [7]. Check irs.gov and consider a nonprofit CPA.
How do I know if my group qualifies for the 990-N e-Postcard?
If your organization's gross receipts are normally $50,000 or less per year, you likely qualify for the 990-N, the simplest filing option, which is submitted electronically and asks for basic identifying information rather than financial detail [3].
Can a small nonprofit file the full Form 990 even if it qualifies for the EZ or N?
Yes. Any organization can choose to file the full Form 990 instead of the EZ or N, even if it's small enough to qualify for the shorter form. Some groups do this for extra transparency with major donors or grant funders.
Does gross receipts mean profit or total income?
Gross receipts means total money received before subtracting expenses, not net profit. A concession stand that brought in $30,000 and spent $18,000 on supplies has $30,000 in gross receipts for 990 purposes, not $12,000.
Do state rules add anything beyond the federal 990 filing?
In most states, yes. Many states require a separate annual charitable solicitation registration, and running raffles or gaming often requires its own state license. Requirements and thresholds vary by state, so confirm current rules with your state's charity registration office or attorney general.
What does a treasurer of a club do when handing off to a new treasurer?
A good handoff includes the EIN, prior years' 990 filings, bank account access, current budget, receipts and records for the current fiscal year, any state registration or raffle license paperwork, and a written summary of upcoming deadlines so nothing gets missed in the transition.
Sources
- IRS, About Form 990: Form 990 is filed by tax-exempt organizations to provide information required under section 6033
- IRS, Automatic Revocation of Exemption: Failing to file required 990-series returns for three consecutive years triggers automatic revocation of tax-exempt status
- IRS, Annual Electronic Filing Requirement for Small Exempt Organizations, Form 990-N (e-Postcard): Organizations with gross receipts normally $50,000 or less may file Form 990-N
- IRS, Instructions for Form 990-EZ: Form 990-EZ eligibility requires gross receipts under $200,000 and total assets under $500,000
- IRS, Tax Exempt Organization Search: The IRS provides a searchable tool to check an organization's exempt status and revocation history
- IRS, Rev. Proc. 2014-11: Streamlined retroactive reinstatement is available for organizations applying within 15 months of automatic revocation