Audited financial statements: the source of financial information on irishnonprofits.ie

<p> Every Irish company is required to prepare and file financial statements or “accounts” each year with the Companies Registration Office (CRO), in line with the requirements of the Companies Acts, 1963-2009. The nonprofits in this database are not permitted to file abridged statements or to avail of any exemption from audit.INKEx uses these accounts to gather information for its database of Irish nonprofit companies. We have prepared the summary financial profile that you see on the site, using only the financial data we have derived from the accounts.

The summary is intended to give a picture of the company’s financial profile only. In order to form a view about the finances of the company in question, read the financial statements, which are available to view by clicking the link on this page.

Consistency in presentation

INKEx’s policy is to capture data objectively from financial statements and to store them in its database.

Financial data are condensed from the database into the presentation format that you see here. To facilitate presentation, in a small number of cases, financial data are moved between captions in order to achieve consistency in presentation. For example, ‘interest income’ is shown on the investment income line, although some companies may have presented this differently in their financial statements.

The data presented are “as found” on the CRO database at the time of download. Very occasionally, accounts may be withdrawn following submission; in these circumstances, the financial summary report is not published here.

Furthermore, if a company is listed for strike-off or has been dissolved, our policy is to withdraw the company’s entire listing (although we hold the historic data in our database).

Statement of Recommended Practice: Accounting and Reporting by Charities (Charities SORP)

Whereas the great majority of Irish nonprofit companies prepare their financial statements using standards promulgated by the Accounting Standards Board (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP), a small – albeit growing – number elect to present their financial statements using formats and captions prescribed in the Statement of Recommended Practice: Accounting and Reporting by Charities (SORP), issued by the UK Charity Commission.

There are two different presentation formats for the summary financial information on this website: one for SORP and one for non-SORP. The summary presentation format for SORP uses SORP captions.

Income and expenditure – non-SORP presentation

Where companies do not follow SORP guidelines, there is wide diversity in the reporting and presentation of income and expenditure.

Income

Given this diversity, and to facilitate people in reading these summaries, we have introduced some standardisation in presenting summary data from the financial statements.

Where the financial statements do not contain any analysis of income, or do not analyse it in a manner that would facilitate its inclusion under the captions that we are using, we indicate this. (“Income has not been analysed in this format”).

At all times, we are happy to discuss with a nonprofit any concerns they may have with our summary presentation.

Expenditure

Many nonprofits analyse expenditure according to activities such as “charitable activities”, “fundraising” or “administration”. The range of activities is extensive, and the terms used are not consistent as between one nonprofit and another.

Most nonprofits list heads of expenditure without allocating it to an activity (‘administration overheads’ or ‘programme costs’).

We record expenditure data by category where this is available (including statutory disclosures such as payroll, audit costs), and store it in our database. However, it is impractical to create a disclosure format that would accommodate the diversity in reporting, and for this reason we provide a single summary figure for ‘Total Expenditure’.

This issue does not arise in the case of nonprofits that report using the Charities SORP.

Abridged accounts

Although every public company (including the nonprofit companies limited by guarantee in this website) is required by law to prepare and file audited accounts annually, a number file abridged financial statements. In these cases, we have captured as much data as possible, and indicated that the summary is derived from abridged accounts.

Group accounts

In a small number of cases, a nonprofit that is a part of a group availing of the provisions of Section 17 of the Companies (Amendment) Act 1986 has filed its parent company’s group accounts with the CRO. In these situations, a note indicates that the financial data presented relate to the group accounts.