Financial reporting
Short and longterm financial reporting is important for an organisation, to know and monitor the progress and the direction of its financial health, within the year, and year over year.
It is a requirement to be sure invoices can be paid, income is monitored, and the budget is not exceeded.
It is also a legal obligation for a non-profit organisation, like it is for any enterprise.
Elements
[edit]- It starts with a business plan
- (yearly) Budget:
- Yearly budget
- Budget review (per quarter, per month)
- (yearly) Financial statements: (legally required; per calendar year)
- Income and expense statement
- Balance sheet (property, depts, provisions, obligations, rights)
- General ledger: the general ledger should always accurately reflect the financial status of the association
- Bank statements: PDF, Excel, or CAMT.053 statements (downloads)
- Invoices (incoming, outgoing)
- Account receivable (debtors)
- Follow-up on (bad) debtors
- Account payable (invoice payment/planning)
- Expenses (expense details: program, project, activity, responsible, date, location, type of cost, party, payment reference)
- Financial planning
- Provisions (large, or longterm projects, delayed invoicing, early payments, year-to-year alignment)
- Project reporting: at the end of a (large) project, or at the end of the year, you need to make a financial analysis
- Cost allocation (by activity, project, campaign, program)
- Preparation for end-of year grant reporting (Wikimedia Foundation)
Resources
[edit]Some banks deliver CAMT.053 statements in XML format. This allows for easy and detailed financial reporting via Excel.[1] You can filter on certain periods, or transactions, or create a pivot table to report on expense claims management.
For most standard environments, a straight incremental Excel download is sufficient. That can be alined with the PDF bank statements.
Tips:
- You better keep all bank transactions per quarter, for each of the bank accounts.
- Better have a separate bank account per business domain
- Download the PDF bank statements (non-repudiation)
- This is very useful for the Internal audit, and the Accounts Committee