Tuesday, 7 August 2007

Annual accounts

I began the day meeting with our auditor Gary Howard. We had a good talk through Watford CVS’s accounts. There are two tricky issues.

First, charities with income below a certain limit have only to produce independently examined accruals accounts rather than a full audit. To readers of the accounts, there is very little difference between the two. The difference is in the amount of work and the cost involved.

For 2006-07, Watford CVS’s income has exceeded £250,000. This means that under the rules in place at the time, we have to have a full audit. The threshold has now been raised to £500,000, but this only applies to financial years beginning after February 2007.

I suggested that we just used our commonsense and stuck with independently examined accruals accounts, as we did last year, and as we will do next year. Gary looked at me with a slight hint of pity. But surely there should be some transitional arrangements that allow people to apply a bit of commonsense?

Secondly, Watford CVS is part of a Pensions Trust scheme. We have received an annual statement from the Trust saying that the WCVS scheme is under funded to the tune of £150,000. Although very real, this liability only materialises if WCVS winds up the scheme. The problem is that the note to the accounts explaining all this will run to nearly two pages.

I also installed our accounts software (QuickBooks) on to the PC of Maria Waszkis (our talented and versatile Office Co-ordinator) and showed her how to enter some data. She picked it up so quickly. Excellent.

Most of the remainder of the day I devoted to tidying up the last few audit queries and completing a draft of the Trustees Report.

Other things

I had another long look at our IT problems as things are getting quite difficult. Our IT guru Angelo and I have nursed the network along for another year, but we now need to start planning an upgrade.

I ended the day by offering some views on a draft questionnaire for some research into the Mental Health needs of local Asian women.