Going through audits usually involves a ton of paperwork such as:
- Trying to search for missing company receipts.
- Reconciling all employee transactions with the bank.
- Cross-checking all transactions with the charity’s financial statements.
- Manually keying in all transactions into an accounting software.
For all charities, automating one’s finances can go a long way in ensuring that there’s no last-minute scramble to get documents in order. Although audits come once a year, staying ahead is crucial in a successful audit.
How Budgetly Can Help Non-Profits With Audits
Fortunately, Budgetly’s prepaid corporate card is not just an ordinary preloaded card. Our cards come with a secure software that allows charities to easily track, capture, and reconcile expenditures. This, in turn, brings about many benefits during audit time.
Reduce Paper Documents
A typical audit requires non-profits to submit a profit and loss statement, cash flow statement, and an Annual Information Statement. Fortunately, soft copy documents are becoming more popular in audits, as they can be kept securely and are much more accessible than hard copies.
For example, retrieving your charity’s monthly expense statement with Budgetly’s software is extremely simple. Users can download the file in either a ‘.CSV’ or ‘.QIF’ format that can be easily viewed and integrated with accounting software such as Xero or MYOB. Expense statements are crucial documents for audits, and it’s essential to have them ready when needed.
Receipts in One Place
Compiling physical receipts is hard work, and they are often misplaced, faded, or lost most of the time. Keeping at least five years of expense records is recommended, and ensuring all those paper receipts are accounted for is difficult manual work. It does not include storing and retrieving these receipts.
This is where Budgetly comes in handy. Using our prepaid corporate card, all charity expenses will be automatically recorded into the software. So staff would only need to capture a picture of the receipt or upload an existing receipt photo onto the app for it to be recorded.
Once uploaded, charity managers or finance personnel will be able to view, store, and retrieve the transaction and its receipts - making audits much simpler.
Seamless Bank Reconciliation
A seamless audit requires charities to reconcile their expenses with their financial statements. However, many challenges come with trying to reconcile your expenses manually. For example, manually cross-checking expenditures may result in human error, which results in even more money and time loss for charities.
With Budgelty, non-profits can set and allocate budgets to their employees or volunteers, which gives them better control of company expenditure. Under the ‘Transactions’ dashboard, all transactions are pre-filled with dates, merchant names, and budget categories. This ensures that during audits:
- Receipts are accounted for
- Transactions are reconciled
- All important audit details such as GST, Merchant Name, and date is readily available.
The best part? It’s all done automatically without any manual work.
Real-time tracking of Finances
One of the biggest challenges of auditing is the inability to track company expenditure efficiently. Oftentimes, there are discrepancies between what appears in the financial statement versus what is actually spent, and charities end up paying more than budgeted on a particular event or vendor.
Real-time tracking of expenditures gives non-profit owners better visibility to where the money is spent, and it eliminates any discrepancies in the company’s financial statements.
With Budgetly, charities can view the last five company transactions on their dashboards in real-time. In addition, these transactions are updated immediately as it happens, giving non-profit owners the ability to monitor and change budgets as needed. It’s also solid proof to auditors that the company is savvy with how money is being spent and has sound systems in place to eliminate overspending.
Integration with Accounting Software
During audits, charities generally should provide a copy of their accounting or bookkeeping program files through accounting software like Xero. Budgetly expense management solution seamlessly integrates with Xero and MYOB - which means less time spent on manually searching and tracking information.
Budgetly’s platform allows charities to synchronise transactions with Xero and easily map Budgetly’s expenditure categories to Xero’s accounts. Besides that, by categorising expenditure to accounts such as R&D, charities can also use it as valid documentation to claim back any expenses as concessions.
Audits can be stressful for most charities, but it doesn't have to be. To understand how our prepaid corporate cards can help simplify your expense management and ultimately ensure hassle-free audit, download our eBook, Managing Expenses with Budgetly. Or schedule a demo with us today.
