Impact Report SPREADS 121223 - Flipbook - Page 26
On Call in action
Leeds based charity, the Zimbabwe
Educational Trust (ZET) is focused
on supporting communities to keep
children in school and out of poverty. It
supports a wide range of educational
projects in Zimbabwe.
The charity relies heavily on the support of volunteers
and its one employee, the part-time Operations
Manager, made contact with Cran昀椀eld Trust through
our On Call service.
The Operations Manager had read one of the Trust’s
online articles, ‘Top 10 昀椀nancial ratios for charities’ and
called for further advice on the programme expense
ratio. The Operations Manager speci昀椀cally called about
the demarcation of UK staff costs between project
delivery and support.
Cran昀椀eld Trust identi昀椀ed one of its 昀椀nancial expert
volunteers, Frank Learner, to explore this issue with the
charity. The On Call conversation focused on assurance
that the inclusion of a portion of a ‘core’ person’s time
into direct service delivery cost is common practice and
that the accounting ledger structure was a reasonable
approach balancing the charity’s own reporting needs
and the expectations of current funders.
Frank was also able to provide two charity examples of
how ‘core’ costs were allocated/apportioned between
direct and support costs to deliver activity programme
expense ratios to help illustrate his advice.
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