Enhancing Yourself
By Frank Lieshout | 5 min read
In our previous articles, we mentioned some helpful advice regarding the preparation, audit and review of your financial statements.
- Money-saving tips in terms of complying with financial reporting regulations.
- How to get the most out of your time and money spent on the reviewing and preparing of your financial statements
- Why it’s actually not that painful preparing your financial statements and getting them reviewed.
- Common issues with the format of Tier 3 & Tier 4 charities’ financial statements
Today we are going to look at enhancing yourself.
There are many ways to enhance yourself, including
- Regular Exercise – also good for the mental health
- Eat away from your desk – take a break
- Get out of your comfort zone and overcome your fears – skydive anyone?
- Cook at home more often and eat healthier
- Watching educational tv shows/online content
- Plastic Surgery
- Improve your sense of humour (some may say I need to do this)
Now that I have your attention, this article is actually about enhancing your financial statements.
Recently Chartered Accountants Australia New Zealand put out a Not for Profit Reporting Guide. In it there was a section on Enhancing Your Reporting.
The main areas relevant to smaller NFP’s and charities were:
Ensure you adopt the appropriate accounting requirements
In determining the appropriate accounting requirements, consider the eligibility criteria including size tests and also whether the entity has public accountability (as defined).
This was covered as part of the relevant areas identified in our earlier article. You may think you are only a small fry but you could be surprised once you add things up – you may fall into a different size category that you thought!
Prepare one annual report for multiple purposes
Consider preparing only one high quality report that contains both narratives – telling your entity’s story including full financial statements. This can be used in multiple ways, including filing with Charities Services, saving duplication of effort and spreading the message about the entity’s good work. Currently, some entities elect to include summary financial information in their annual report and prepare separate financial statements that are filed with Charities Services. Others extract their financials from the annual report for filing.
Tailor reporting templates to your entity
If your entity’s performance and/or financial report is based on a reporting template, ensure it is tailored to the entity. Templates can be a very useful base to assist in efficiently preparing reports, especially for Tier 3 and 4 charities using the XRB templates. Consider the following simple steps to enhance your report:
- Remove notes that are not applicable
- Delete lines where this year’s and last year’s figures are zero
- Change generic wording where appropriate
Once again this was also mentioned as part of our previous articles:
- Common issues with the format of Tier 3 & Tier 4 charities’ financial statements
Clearly identify the financial statements
Remember, the financial statements are generally not the only document that must be prepared and lodged. Clearly identify the financial statements and distinguish them from other information in the same published documents.
We all see the glossy picture bits, but you don’t want the not-so-exciting (but important) financial information lost.
Include the relevant legislation in the ‘Basis of Preparation’ note
Where financial statements are prepared in accordance with certain legislative requirements, refer to that legislation in the basis of preparation note within the financial statements.
Don’t want to say told you so, but once again we had that in our previous earlier article.
By enhancing your organisation’s financial statements you are actually enhancing yourself with additional skills – no surgery required.
If you’d like to know more about the variety of ways we can support your team, get in touch with us for more information.
