This Charity Finance Week webinar focuses on practical budgeting and digital finance transformation for charities and not-for-profits.

Hosted by Tristan Blythe, editor of Charity Finance Magazine, and presented by Andrew Faulkner, Senior Charity Lead at AccountsIQ, the session explores how modern cloud finance systems can help charities:

• Build and maintain robust, realistic budgets
• Track restricted and unrestricted funds properly
• Automate manual and repetitive finance tasks
• Deliver clear, timely reports for trustees, funders and regulators

Andrew draws on his experience working with over 200 charities and NFPs and his role on AccountsIQ’s Product Advisory Group, where he helps shape the product roadmap specifically with charity needs in mind.

Speakers

Andrew Faulkner
Senior Charity Lead, AccountsIQ

• 4+ years at AccountsIQ with a dedicated focus on charities and NFPs
• Supports organisations through finance system change and wider digital finance transformation
• Member of AccountsIQ’s Product Advisory Group, helping decide which features and technologies to build next

Host: Tristan Blythe
Editor, Charity Finance Magazine

What the session covers

1. Who are AccountsIQ & where do they sit in the market?

• Cloud-only accounting platform (founded 2005, launched 2008)
• ~20,000 daily users in 60+ countries
• Strong footprint in UK & Ireland charity sector (including multi-entity groups with trading subsidiaries)
• Positioned above entry-level tools (Xero, QuickBooks, Sage 50) and below large ERPs (NetSuite, Dynamics, etc.) – more power without ERP complexity/cost

2. From “old” to “modern” charity finance function

Andrew contrasts:

Old finance function

• Heavy focus on transaction processing
• Compliance done – but little time left for analysis
• Finance seen as a back-office function

Modern finance function

• Uses automation to minimise manual processing
• Still meets all compliance and SORP/SOFA reporting obligations
• Frees time for business partnering:
  • Helping programme leads and managers stay on budget
  • Providing timely insights to trustees, funders and management

Three pillars:

1. Efficiency – automate data capture, posting, approvals
2. Collaboration – bring non-finance stakeholders into workflows (budget holders, managers, approvers)
3. Insights – dashboards and reports that non-finance users can understand and act on

3. Charity stakeholders & reporting needs

Andrew walks through the different stakeholder groups a charity must serve:

• Volunteers
• Paid staff
• Donors (individuals, corporates, trusts, government)
• Suppliers
• Beneficiaries & local communities
• Grant providers and funders
• Regulators & charity commissions / OSCR

Each expects different levels and formats of reporting – which is hard to deliver if finance is tied up in spreadsheets and manual work.

4. Knowing your data: sources & structure

Typical data sources:

• Donor/CRM systems & fundraising platforms
• Online payment providers (Stripe, PayPal, GoCardless, etc.)
• Payroll & HR systems
• Project management / grant management tools
• Banks, bank feeds
• Expense apps and staff reimbursements
• Supplier invoices and journals

How AccountsIQ structures this data:

• Three-tier chart of accounts
  • Category → Subcategory → GL code
• Six analysis “dimensions” (departments)
  • Each dimension can have unlimited elements (e.g. cost centres, projects, funds, regions, activities, departments, donors)
• Combined, these support:
  • SORP/SOFA breakdown
  • Restricted vs unrestricted funds
  • Project-level tracking
  • Multi-funder / multi-activity reporting

This structure underpins both day-to-day coding and budgeting/reforecasting, allowing very granular analysis.

5. What can you automate?

Andrew gives an overview of common automation opportunities:

Income / Sales

• Integrations with donor/CRM systems to bring in donations and income details
• Recurring invoices and deferred income journals
• Bulk sending of donor invoices/statements where relevant

Staff expenses

• Mobile expense capture (photo of receipt, coding, submission)
• Digital approval workflows
• Attaching proof of spend to each claim

Purchases & AP

• Purchase order raising & multi-step approval
• Emailing supplier invoices directly into the AP inbox
• PO-invoice matching with tolerances and auto-approval rules
• Bulk payment runs with approvals and remittance advice
• Accrual journals and cost tracking on supplier accounts

Banking

• Bank feeds to 12,500+ banks globally
• Machine learning + traffic light system to speed up reconciliation
• Bank rec where ~95% of lines can be auto-matched, leaving only exceptions for manual review

GL, VAT & multi-entity

• Automated prepayments, accruals, deferred income
• VAT (standard plus partial VAT)
• Intercompany invoices and journals
• One-click consolidation with eliminations and FX handling for groups

Integrations

• Library of pre-built integrations and custom integrations via:
  • Automated file imports
  • API connectors
  • In-house integrations team
• Experience integrating with:
  • CRMs: Salesforce, Dynamics, HubSpot, Donorfy, Blackbaud / Raiser's Edge
  • Payment platforms: GoCardless, Stripe, PayPal
  • Ticketing/EPOS and payroll systems

6. Budgets: where to start & how to maintain them

Key points:

• Use historic actuals and previous budgets as a starting point
• In AccountsIQ you can:
  • Download pre-populated budget templates (GL, categories, departments, etc.)
  • Include current or prior actuals and/or existing budgets
  • Budget at GL + dimension level (e.g. income by fund, event, donor type, project, department)

The system supports:

• Two parallel budgets:
  • Original Budget
  • Revised/Reforecast budget
• Reporting against:
  • Actuals vs Budget
  • Actuals vs Revised Budget
  • Prior-year comparisons

Andrew emphasises:

• A budget is only useful if it’s maintained
• Many charities reforecast half-yearly or quarterly; some move towards monthly
• Discipline around period close and timely reporting is key

7. Expenditure control & approvals

Andrew shows how purchase workflows support budget control:

• Multi-step approvals (budget holder → finance → CEO/trustee etc.)
• Different rules by:
  • Value thresholds
  • Department / project / fund
• Visibility for approvers:
  • Budget for the period
  • Commitments already raised
  • Remaining budget available
• Options for:
  • Auto-approval under a low value (e.g. £20)
  • PO → invoice matching with tolerance rules

Approvals can be completed:

• In the web platform
• Via email
• Via mobile app

8. Reporting & “single source of truth”

Main message: stop breaking the link between system and reports with one-off spreadsheet exports.

AccountsIQ offers:

• 250+ standard reports (P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, aged debtors/creditors, project/fund reports, etc.)
• Filters for:
  • Periods, years
  • Budgets & revised budgets
  • Prior years
  • GL categories
  • All six analysis dimensions
• Dashboards for:
  • Income & expenditure
  • Working capital & KPIs
  • Fund / project / department performance
• Ability to click-through from dashboard charts/tables to underlying data
• OData connector for:
  • Live links to Excel
  • Live links to Power BI
  • Reports that update with a simple Refresh, rather than csv imports

9. Charity case studies (mentioned)

• Archkl / Archelk Trust
  • Uses AccountsIQ for:
    • Project accounting
    • SORP-compliant reporting
    • Multi-dimensional reporting
    • Deep budget tracking and reforecasting
• Hampshire Cultural Trust
  • Phased implementation, including:
    • Ticketing data
    • EPOS
    • Payroll
  • All feeding into AccountsIQ as a single financial source of truth

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