Do you want to have an award-winning non-profit financial report?

How are you registered, including your tax status? Which other organisations are you connected or related to? Where do you operate? How many staff do you have and what are your values?

What’s your vision, mission and purpose? What are your overall strategic objectives?

How does your governing body fulfil its responsibilities? Who are the members of the board and senior management?

What were your goals or objectives?

Depending on your context, what impact, outputs and activities were achieved? How did that compare to your targets?

Share stories, quotes or photos to help bring the numbers and data to life and give your stakeholders a voice.

These might be operational, political, environmental or financial. How did you mitigate COVID and lockdown related problems? How did you combat or prevent fraud? What about exchange rates, or safeguarding? Focus on what is relevant and be objective.

Make sure the basics are not left out! Include your accounting policies and make sure there are notes to provide a more detailed breakdown of significant figures. Other important questions to answer here are: What currency are your financial statements presented in? What’s the year-end exchange rate to relevant other currencies? Which reporting framework are you using?

How dependent are you on institutional donor funding? What unrestricted income do you have? How many months-worth or unrestricted reserves do you have? What’s your liquidity situation?

And, in case you have restricted grants, how much remained unspent at the year end?

There is no formulaic approach here but your report should help us to see the link between what you spent and how it supported your activities. You might split expenditure by programmatic area, or in some cases calculate unit costs. How much was spent on administration? Use graphs and charts to help communicate the key messages.