Audit

Spending this afternoon preparing for an audit. We get funding from loads of different places including Europe and the Government. Lots of these people insist on auditing us, often years after a project has finished. Later this week someone from Government office is coming to audit a project that finished 3 years ago.

When they audit they look at all of our finances for 1 month of that funding to check that we have a receipt for each purchase we have made, that this is properly accounted for in our internal systems, and that this matches up with both cheque stubs and our bank statements. As they trace even small purchases such as a pint of milk, this can take a long time.

The second bit of the audit is looking at our outputs. For each bit of funding we usually have so many outputs to achieve e.g. number of children attending an event or number of people trained. At the audit we have to provide proof for each of the ouputs. As we have a system to collect this proof or evidence each month for all of our different streams of funding this won't be difficult to show at our audit.

But all of this auditing and monitoring takes time from our staff.