Thank you to our Treasurers!
I want to start with an enormous thank you to our Treasurers for the year just gone, not only have you all given your time and supported your centres but its official – you did a great job!
The 2019 year end and finance pack returns has been a success beyond what we even imagined, the centre accounts were able to be reconciled with errors of less that 0.2%! this across over 420 centres is astounding and has had both myself and our auditors nearly fall of our chairs in surprise.
This has also meant our consolidation process has been quick and we have not needed any additional support saving huge amounts of money. Our audit is almost complete and our auditors have commented we are well ahead of other large consolidating charity groups so well done us!
I also want to thank all of those who provided feedback on the finance pack – especially as it was so complimentary, and next year I intend to follow the same process – unless off course I can make it even easier!
So once again THANK YOU and if you are reading this and are not a treasurer, please give yours a pat on the back from me and tell them what an awesome job they are doing!
Group Accounts Update and Interesting Stats
As suggested above the Group accounts have been drafted and are in audit as we speak, the auditors have found this much quicker and simpler than first thought and this has resulted in less need to go out to centres requesting support documents, which saves us all a bunch of time!
At this stage we are well on track to have these complete and ready for use in early January and with our first unqualified opinion (FYI – that’s the good one).
As I have done most the draft I thought I would share some interesting facts, our total group revenue for the year was $19.1m of which $12.6m came from MoE in the form of Bulk Funding and other funding types such as targeted support and isolation funding. Levies for the year totalled just shy of $5m which is an effective rate of 39.5% of all MoE funding.
For centres who have joined the Group your combined savings on audit and filing fees since 2017 is just over $200,000 – and I can imagine this is being spent on much better things. Insurance costs have also decreased by roughly $100k in the same time period.
One of the most noticeable increased has been on Repairs and Maintenance with over $2m more being injected in our buildings in the 2018/19 year compared the same period in 2016/17. I hope this suggests we have some beautiful fresh centres and playgrounds out there for our centres to enjoy.
Xero Expenses
Some of our Treasurers may have enjoyed using Xero expenses during the free trial to the end of October, however unfortunately the free trial is now over and we have done some analysis of the cost benefit of this add on and found the $5 per person/per month even if they only submit one claim to be too high for our organisation. Consideration has been put into this and as the bill could across our group quickly run into the thousands each month we don’t feel this is what levies were intended to support. As a result, we have had to turn this feature off for both the National organisation and centres, any centre that does use this feature will be billed for their use.
This doesn’t mean you cant reimburse members, this can still be done through Business/Bills to Pay/New Bill or through the Email to Bills feature where you can forward the receipts and claim form from an email to a draft bill in Xero and treat it as a Supplier payment.