Accountability & Transparency

 

Financial System and Procedure in Place: SoLife has highly qualified financial officers with experience ranging from 22 to 18 years in grant management. The organization has policies and guidelines for all financial operations; these had been developed into Standard Operating procedures (SOP). We have also set minimum standards of internal controls that ensure accountability and limit conflict of interests. The Financial Manual briefly covers some other areas like petty cash holding, budgeting, renovations and chart of accounts and job descriptions of the core finance personnel. We prepares our financial reports using Excel Spread Sheet and PeachTree Accounting otherwise known as (Sage50) and in line with Donor discretion.

Separate Account for each Project Funds: We keep separate bank account for every project with reputable commercial banks in the country. Our financial operations are both manual and electronic. In our financial records, all direct expenses are charged to the appropriate project while indirect costs like rent, salaries of staff, indirect labour, vehicle maintenance and fueling etc are apportioned on a rational Ratio basis to each of the projects. Financial reports are extracted from our records and reported according to the donors’ guidelines. Where no such guideline exists, we provide reports using our own template.

Budget Preparation, Implementation and Control: Projects are usually at different levels of implementation at the end of a typical year, therefore we usually do budget variance review at the outset of preparing the budget for a new year. We use a hybrid of previous year’s budget and activity-based budget. Budget variance and addition to cost project activities for the new financial year make up the budget for the New Year. We also maintain purely activity-based budget for specific donor projects.

Financial Reporting: Our policy is based on receipts and payments report and we have quarterly breakdown of budgets and we produce quarterly balance sheets. We normally produce quarterly grant reports or as per the demand of donors. A reputable audit firm audits our account annually.