Last month the ACNC (Australian Charities and Not-For-Profits Commission) Taskforce completed a series of community consultations.
ACNC Taskforce Community Consultations
They travelled around the country to explain their plans and seek feedback from members of the public. If you missed out, you can catch up on the latest on the ACNC website.
Reporting Requirements
Much of the discussion was on registration and reporting requirements. Initially (from 1 July 2013) registration will only be required for charities and voluntary for other not-for-profits. Annual reporting will commence at the end of that year.
Summary Reports for ACNC
The Taskforce certainly sets out with noble aims when it comes to reporting. The idea that you could submit one report to one agency which then provides other agencies the parts they need is attractive. However, the current plans are for very high-level, summary reports to the ACNC. It’s hard to see how that would provide sufficient information to any other agencies.
Standard Business Reporting
There are ideas of automating some of the reporting directly from accounting software. Calxa’s CEO, Mick Devine shares his views:
“I think the direction is right but I can’t see it being really useful until we have some sort of electronic submission using SBR (Standard Business Reporting) straight from your software. Even when done manually, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours, once a year, for most organisations to provide the information required – it should be just an extract of your general accounting information.”
This seems a small price to pay for greater transparency and giving the public more confidence in the whole sector.