Opinion

Train lines

Finance | 1 Sep 2007

Charities have a responsibility to develop the finance directors of the future, argues Chris Harris.

Do you ever wish that the rest of the world would just leave you in peace for a while? I discovered recently that my finance team like the year-end time because it is their only opportunity to lock the doors and tell everyone else to go away. They do such a good job I am quite happy to let them be but for the rest of the year they have no choice but to return to the task of providing a service to stakeholders – with the doors firmly open.

The charity sector used to be caricatured as the place that you retired into for the last few years of your career, having made your money and burnt yourself out on the treadmill of the real world. Come to the charity sector for a bit of a lie down. This can still be possible if you find yourself a shady backwater but these are increasingly few and far between because the sector is undergoing signifi cant change and development.

The Sorp changes have made charity accounting much more demanding and the tighter scrutiny regime from the Charity Commission has meant that all of us have had to raise our game. The government has discovered charities and this has meant an unending stream of initiatives and attention.

The attention and growth is not without its advantages. Government continues to put resources into capacity building and the level of dialogue has improved. The sector is continuing to grow, albeit disproportionately, and those at the top can afford to pay a proper level of fees to advisers. This increases the pool of skilled firms which means a finance director is increasingly likely to get well informed support when requested.

So should you go to work for a charity? Salaries have increased and it is now possible to make a career within charity finance. You can be part of changing the world – and get paid for it. This is in stark contrast to people working in the other sectors who hate their jobs but need to carry on just to make ends meet. Charities are becoming accessible to young graduates and some of the larger ones now run graduate training schemes. Specialist training is available for those without a background in accountancy.

There is still a place for mature accountants that move into the sector, especially if the mortgage has been paid off and pension arrangements mean that a high salary is not required. Charities are becoming more business like and many skills are transferable, however, you have to realise that charities are different and there will be much to learn. Many take to the increased responsibility and requirement to be a jack of all trades as a helpful antidote to the high level of specialisation often required in banking or finance. There is training available for qualified accountants. There are many people working within charities who hold no formal qualification. They have learnt by experience and may not want to pursue the full accountancy training route and in the past there was little else on offer.

I believe that those of us with staff responsibility have a duty to make sure our people have good opportunities to develop. We need to think creatively about the finance directors of the future and the level of professional support we would like them to have, even if we have not had it ourselves. We need to encourage our own professional bodies to be more responsive to the sector.

It is all very well for an enthusiast to exhort the troops on but for many the day job is demanding enough without adding anything else. They would have plenty of sympathy with my finance team and prefer to just finish a few days at 5pm for a change. But where does the buck stop? Can we afford to just keep our head down and hope the next generation works it out for themselves? We have a both a personal and a corporate responsibility to ensure there is a reasonable work balance and that there is time for staff training and development. We cannot go on relying on others to do the training for us and then complain when the training they receive is not relevant.

We have a challenge to set our own house in order and ensure that charity finance as a discipline goes from strength to strength.

Chris Harris is finance director at Action for Blind People and chair of CIPFA’s charities panel

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Directory: Action for Blind People | CIPFA