Building a foundation. Ensuring your charity or social enterprise gets off to the best footing for its accountancy, compliance and assurance. ‘Hands-on’ support for charitable entities in early trading.

Charitable entities in their first year or so of existence will face a number of compliance hurdles, which can be time-consuming and daunting even for the most experienced entrepreneur. Thoroughfare aims to take some of the hard work and stress off founders’ minds, so they can be assured their entity is compliant whilst also receiving meaningful and reliable financial information upon which to base crucial, early decisions for achieving their organisation’s goals.

Thoroughfare can take ownership of the elements of the design, set-up and execution required to achieve compliant and meaningful accounting, for start-up charities and social enterprises. Some examples of the tasks involved include:

• First submissions to the regulator — design of an annual report and accounts template, or full preparation of the year-end statutory accounts. These might be Charities SORP compliant accruals accounts or receipts and payments accounts to submit to the Charity Commission via the Annual Return, or micro-entity accounts to send to Companies House. Thoughtful suggestions as to the content of Trustees’ Annual Reports to demonstrate early outcomes and impact, to be compliant whilst also attractive to potential new partners.

• Procurement and set-up of an appropriate accounting system.

• Design and build of a chart of accounts — determining the nominal ledger codes you shall use to record income, expenditure and balance sheet items, which will appear on the trial balance.

• Design of management accounts templates, and other internal financial reporting processes.

• Consulting around early governance, assistance with developing a suite of policy documents and procedures manuals to ensure resilience.

• A considerate fee structure with a degree of pro bono work for young entities.