As a part of trustee’s responsibility, trustees must impose proper financial controls to ensure the efficiency of finance function. Budgets provide a guideline towards forthcoming expenditure and it gives an opportunity to analyse the differences between actual financial outcomes of the charity. The trustees can analyse the difference between actual outcome and projected outcome.

To run an efficient finance function it is imperative that trustees create financial effective controls. Most churches/charities deal with cash and an effective control environment will help to ensure that all cash has been collected and recorded and banked. This will ensure that there are segregation of duties to detect and defend fraud.

Periodic management accounts allows a charity keeps monitoring its financial and operational activities to ensure the critical decisions can be made. Each charity is different so what is monitored may be different. A management account structure will depend upon the way a charity operates. This is a key process for any forward thinking charity.

Charity SORP (Statement of recommended practice) propose that it is mandatory to prepare Annual Accounts, Trustees report and Independent examiner report after a certain level of annual turnover including gift aid.