Life’s Got Easier
By Frank Lieshout | 4 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
- Enhancing your financial statements
Today we are going to look at how life has got easier.
here are many ways in which our lives have got easier in the last few years, including
- Electronic Potato Peeler
- Night light attached to your toilet that illuminates when you walk in
- Smart Toothbrush – a mouthguard with rotating electric toothbrush heads
- Shark spotter drone
- An alarm clock on wheels that forces you to get up – a debatable one for me!
They are not the only things that have got easier.
If you are a Tier 4 charity, your reporting has got easier.
A Tier 4 charity can now do simpler reporting of your financial statements.
Recently the External Reporting Board (XRB), released a simplified Not-For-Profit Tier 4 template.
It is intended for smaller charities, focusing on reporting key information and can be used by registered charities to meet their reporting obligations.
This simpler template (available here) is intended for small Tier 4 charities who have:
- a single bank account
- few or no other significant resources (the things you own such as cars, land or buildings)
- few or no significant commitments (the things you owe such as bank loans)
- not entered into other complex transactions (such as multi-year grants or controlling businesses)
Charities Services have created a Quick Guide to go alongside the new template.
It can also be accessed here.
It should be noted that this includes the key concepts that are in their full Tier 4 Guide. This full Tier 4 guide should be used if you get stuck on anything.
However, it still needs to be correct.
When you are using this simplified Tier 4 template (or the Tier 3 or Full Tier 4 templates), the financial statements still need to be correct.
You can’t just put figures in the template. You need to have proper records with your workings and calculations to support those figures. If not, you won’t be able to explain where you go them.
Also, as we have noted in our previous articles, although the templates are useful to assist in efficiently preparing financial statements, you need to tailor the templates to make them correct.
For example:
- Removing notes that are not applicable
- Deleting lines where this year’s and last year’s figures are zero
- Changing generic wording where appropriate
It’s pleasing to see that feedback has worked, and those pesky red dots have gone from this new simpler template. So if you are using that template, that is one hassle you won’t have to worry about.
So life has got easier for at least some of you, and it is probably nothing to do with the electronic potato peeler.
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.
