Nonprofit finance, accounting, and tax news. Other tidbits of interest to the charity community.
(cross-posted from my other blog for CPAs that stop by here. This is the start of a 3 post series)
All of the SASs are being rewritten. All those new/revised/updated/clarified/etc documents will go into effect on the same day.
Ouch. For us change-phobic CPAs, there is a world of change on the horizon.
Question: What do you call a situation when an independent organization that is not tax-exempt wants a church to process gifts so donors get a tax-deductible receipt?
Perception is reality – I really dislike that statement since it excuses people from trying to understand things they don’t understand, but then that is just my perception (yes, the last phrase is a joke!).
God knows, an article in The Economist, shows us the magazine’s perception of the church community. Their perception is likely to be representative of many people. (more…)
We need to understand the perception of the church world by people outside our communities. Particularly important to consider now are the perceptions of those with regulatory power. The report from Sen. Charles Grassley’s staff of the Senate Finance Committee has opened up discussion of expanded regulation and oversight of churches.
I have written an on-line CPE course on SSARS called Compilation and Review: Practice Issues. It is a 3 hour course covering a variety of practice issues for CPAs providing comps and reviews. It is written at the overview level.
Arriving soon at the CCH Learning Center. When it is available on-line, I’ll give more detail and a link to the course.
I wrote the course in a little more casual voice that you might expect to see in a technical class, but not quite as casual as you see on this blog. If you enjoy the style of writing you see here, you might enjoy the online CPE.
More detail to follow!
Update: 3-hour online CPE course called Compilation and Review: Practice Issues (Third Edition) is now available at the CCH Learning Center website. Course discussed in more detail at this post.
Two great articles on how to analyze the giving data for your church by Chris Gartman of PSK at their blog, Faith-Based Accounting.
The software you use for recording contributions by donor should be able to give you some great data. What can you learn from that information?
The Internet moves fast. When things goes against you on the ‘net, you have to move fast too. If you know how to use social media, you can.
Taco Bell’s situation at the moment is a good example of someone actively using social media in a fast-moving, difficult situation.
I have started a series of posts on my other blog discussing the documentation requirements under SSARS 19 for compilations and reviews. I won’t be cross-posting those discussions on this blog. The first item is here.
Update – Discussions of reviews start here.
Update – SSARS 19 had been replaced by SSARS 21. All the reports have been revised. You can check out these posts at my other blog, Attestation Update:
Corey Pfaffe writes at the MinistryCPA blog. He has a lot of good comments. Suggest you visit his site once in a while. Two posts I wanted to mention specifically:
After the Cooks Source fiasco discussed here and other posts, it is delightful to see a company that knows how to apologize and takes clear ownership of their problem.
37signals provides a number of collaborative software products. I don’t use their services, but I thoroughly enjoyed a book they wrote on the lessons they have learned in their business. Enjoyed it so much I wrote an Amazon review, which I discussed here. I read their blog everyday. I heartily recommend it.
Anyway, last November and December their flagship program had a lot of intermittent outages.
No surprise there.
The Wall Street Journal reports here the volume of churches going through distressed sale of their property has increased rapidly over the last couple of years. In addition to a good background article, which I think you should read, there is a great pair of charts that gives good info.
Welcome to the CPAs arriving here from an internet search. This post is just for the CPAs in my audience.
For concise news on the changed social security tax rates for 2011, see New Changes in Payroll Taxes, a post by Autum Awalt at the Faith-Based Accounting blog.
You’ve played the word game — if California was a separate country, it would be the Xth largest economy in the world.
The Economist magazine has revised the game with a graph that matches the GDP of each state with another country with the closest GDP. Map is here. The ‘population’ button at the top changes the map to match each state with a country with the closest population size.
A few fun observations: