Nonprofit finance, accounting, and tax news. Other tidbits of interest to the charity community.
Where our culture is headed and the resulting impact on ministries is the focus of the Winter 2010 issue of Outcomes from Christian Leadership Alliance. Lots of great articles that I’ll talk about a while.
The rate of change around us makes me dizzy.
I’ve written several posts on using Facebook in a ministry setting and the privacy issues for personal use. Click the ‘social media’ category at the right to see what I’ve said before. For another perspective on the Facebook privacy issues, see a post at ULVOG DOT COM, by my cousin Christian Ulvog.
It is easy to measure how much stuff you did. It is very hard to measure what you actually accomplished.
It is easy to count:
Asking how your spiritual life is going will lead to evaluating your prayer life and devotional habits. Those questions will probably lead to a very discouraging answer of not well enough, or not as good as it should be.
Instead try these suggestions from John Ortberg in The Me I Want To Be:
Previously discussed the tragedy of fraud. The ripple effects of the massive Madoff fraud have been spreading. The ripples include a lost life this past week.
(duplicate of post from Attestation Update blog)
What in the world are unconditional requirements and presumptively mandatory requirements?
If you provide audits to your clients, you know those terms. If you don’t deal with audits in your firm, these are two very weird terms in the SSARSs world, newly introduced by SSARS 19. These phrases have been around since SSARS 16, which was effective December 2007. The impact hadn’t been that large because there was only SSARS 17 and 18. These two phrases are lots more important since they show up in SSARS 19 quite frequently. (more…)
(duplicate of post from Attestation Update blog)
If you want a great summary of all the changes from SSARS 19, the Journal of Accountancy has a great article here from the May 2010 magazine.
Are you changing the world or are you just running around in circles? What change is happening because of all your effort? That’s what we mean by outcome measures. Many donors are now asking what are you accomplishing? instead of what are you doing?
What is the difference?
Update – SSARS 19 had been replaced by SSARS 21.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:
SSARS 19, which goes into effect the end of 2010, specifies titles and addressing for compilation and review reports.
Looks like I’ve taken both sides of this issue: suggesting you drop your web site and put all your effort into developing a Facebook ‘page’ on this post, and then saying taking that approach is such a significant risk that you should seriously consider not doing so on this post.
Which is it? (more…)
There are new risks to go along with all the great technology we have available today. Previously discussed the risk of not owning your domain name and being trapped by your tech provider. This post goes the opposite direction of discussing the risk of getting shut down by your social media provider.
Illustration 3 – being shut down by your social media platform – don’t put all your eggs in one basket
The accounting rule makers are working on a massive change to the way financial statements are presented. Since NPOs will be exempted out of the new rules, I have only discussed them on my other blog. If you are interested, you can see my post here.
Check out how to present multiple pieces of data from every country on the planet over a 40 year trend in such a way that anyone can get your point. Professor Hans Rosling has a way of showing extremely complicated data so you can get the idea in a few minutes.
Some examples:
Both ECFA and Guidestar recently released survey results of giving trends in 2010. Wanted to put the results side by side. (more…)