Uganda: Accounting Achievements and Hiding from Hippos on Safari

On Monday I arrived at my new placement on the outskirts of Kampala.  It’s called Children’s Welfare Mission and is a children’s village with a primary school (mainly for orphans) and a secondary school. It also has a clinic, for use by the staff, students and local community as well as a church. In the afternoon, Joyce (one of the Dutch Directors) gave me a guided tour of the compound.  It certainly looks very impressive, lots of smart looking buildings – classrooms, dormitories, head office, 2 other guesthouses, staff houses, playroom, big hall etc. 

Dormitories at the Children's Village

I am the second AFID volunteer to come here so I spent the first week having meetings with the relevant members of staff to build on what I had already read in the previous volunteers report and to clarify certain matters.  I also discussed the overall objectives and approach for my visit with the directors.

The 2 main objectives were to come up with formalised financial policies and procedures to put in place and devise a budgeting & month end reporting procedure, which would include appropriate cost allocation. As well as these objectives, I ended up doing some detailed analysis of the Term 2 P&L that had been created by the accountant and suggested various areas for improvement.

In order to try and meet these objectives, I undertook various types of working approaches which included:

• Having discussions with staff members to find out how things work at the moment – both one to one and in small groups
• Viewing examples of financial records currently in place
• Coming up with a list of ideas and suggestions and discussing these with staff to get their feedback and revising them where necessary
• Carrying out reviews of certain figures and reconciling different balances
• Doing my own research on charity accounting in order to help to provide advise as in England I never audited any charities!
  
  

The following is a list of the main outcomes the staff and I achieved during my visit.

• Writing a financial policies and procedures manual and communicating it to the heads of department in a meeting. 
• Creating a few standard template forms to be used (bank reconciliation, salary advance, requisition form, petty cash record).
• Creating standard budget template to be used and devising an improved approach to budgeting for the mission.
• Giving a presentation on the basics of budgeting and the process of how it could work in practice at the mission.
• Devising a workplanner checklist to show how often different tasks need to be done and by whom.  Coupled with this, a breakdown of tasks that each of the finance team are responsible for.
• Detailed analysis on debtors (school fees for the secondary school) and payroll for the secondary school.  This part definitely brought me back to auditing days at Deloitte!