How long is it since you’ve performed a financial health check on your club or NFP organisation?

If you are responsible for the financial management of a club or NFP and are not sure that things are the way they are supposed to be, you will need to find out if you are performing well. To start with, you can check our recent blog post – How Sustainable Your is Your NFP? If, after reading it, you are still anxious about the financial situation at your NFP, you will have to undertake some additional actions in order to find out the truth about the health of your financial situation. In such cases, one of the best options you have is to refer to Mango’s Health Check – a guide that will tell you the truth without too much effort on your side.

The health check is a free resource designed for the financial managers of small and medium clubs and not-for-profit organisations. Its main aim is to help you assess the financial management of your company through self-assessment and see which areas need improvement.

You don’t need to have a financial education of advanced knowledge to complete the Health Check as it is pretty self-explanatory and simple to do. Even if you don’t know some of the terms used, you can find a pretty good list at the end of the document – just after the list of other resources that can help you with the financial management of your NFP. These resources include Capacity Building Support, five training courses, Mango’s Guide to Financial Management for NGOs and certain free resources that you can download.

The Health Check Guide itself is very well-organised and simple to use. It starts with explanatory notes – what Mango is and how to use the Guide, then offers six sections that assess the six aspects of your financial system – Planning & Budgeting, Basic Accounting Systems, Financial Reporting, Internal Controls, Grant Management, Staffing. Each section starts with a short explanation, after which you need to choose an answer for a couple of questions. Each question can be answered with 5, 4, 1, or 0, which are points that you sum up.

In the end, you will get a score between 0 and 300. In the section Interpreting Your Score, you will find a table that will tell you the condition of your financial system’s aspects – Low, Medium or High Risk. Simply put, if you have more than 240 points, you are doing well. 151-240 points means that you are doing well, but there are things you can improve. If your score is below 150, you will have to work hard to get things in order. Have in mind, however, that even if you have a score of more than 240, some of your sectors may still be in high risk – for that reason, use the table to assess each sector separately.

All in all, this great self-assessment tool by Mango will show you if there are problems with your financial system. What’s more, it will show you where exactly the problems are, providing you with the opportunity to see what exactly the problems are. Then, all you will have to do is get to work and find the solutions to the problems. Or, if you need help, contact Admin Bandit now and we will find them for you!