Charities

Why haysmacintyre?

haysmacintyre’s award winning Charities team is one of the largest in the country. haysmacintyre is auditor to more of the top 5,000 charities than any other UK Accountancy firm (Charity Financials' league table; correct at time of submission) and advise over 600 charities which represent 40% of our firm’s annual fees. The quality of our service to our charity clients is best evidenced by the results of the annual Charity Finance Audit Survey. We are very proud to have been ranked for eleven years in the top five for 'Charity Expertise'. This recognises our knowledge of and investment in the sector and is an acknowledgement of the quality of our staff. This experience has helped us to develop a thorough and in-depth knowledge of the business issues, risks and challenges charities face and how we can best support you.

Our team is made up of charity specialists who are enthusiastic, friendly and knowledgeable. We have made a conscious decision to operate from a single office as we feel that this concentration in one location allows us to deliver a proactive, comprehensive and cost-effective service to clients. 

Year round support

Our partner-led service means you’ll have a dedicated partner who will work closely with you to understand your needs and goals and provide practical solutions. Part of our ethos as an organisation is to be accessible to our clients whenever they need support. 

Sharing our expertise

As charity specialists, we produce regular updates and briefings, including our popular Charity and Not for Profit eNews, as well as various benchmarking reports and more in depth articles. We also regularly run training and topical seminars for charities, which provide trustees and staff the opportunity to meet and network with others in similar organisations or facing similar challenges. Our team of specialist charity partners also speak at our Trustee Training programme, run in partnership with Farrer & Co and Cazenove.

Our team are encouraged to volunteer as trustees and governors at charities, to gain an understanding of the ‘client’s perspective’, as well as supporting charities with their professional skills. This means that many of our staff have first-hand experience of being on a trustee board, which helps them to better understand their clients’ challenges.

Our work in the charity sector is very important to us and we support the activities of Charity Finance Group (CFG), Civil Society, National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO) and other sector bodies.

As well as our audit and advisory work in the sector, our staff have nominated two charities to support as a firm. We regularly hold events to fundraise for our charities and staff teams participate in fundraising challenges such as the London Triathlon. Our current charities are CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) and SANDS (Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity).

Our services

Our team has wide range of specialist expertise.

Our services include:

Case Studies

Structuring a hospice effectively

We have acted for this adult hospice for a number of years. In our initial year we identified that the structure could be improved. The team went through each income stream and identified what should be retained in the trading subsidiary and this resulted in the transfer of other activities to the charity. The new structure allows the group to maximise tax relief as well as to mitigate the risk of withdrawal of mandatory rates relief. Following the restructure, our VAT team advised on group VAT registration and trained the finance staff to implement partial exemption treatment of input VAT recovery. Following group VAT registration, the input VAT recoverability was significantly more than the previous structure. The charity also built a second hospice and we were involved in advising on fundraising strategy as well as VAT advice on the construction. Our VAT team explored all possibilities including design and build and we met with the construction company to ensure the simplest and most tax efficient route was followed. Considerable input VAT was recovered following our advice.

Advising an International NGO

In the last six years, this International NGO has grown tenfold. In addition to adding value through our audit approach using eAudit, such as ensuring systems, procedures and the infrastructure met the increase in the level of planned activity, we have advised and carried out significant projects to benefit the client. This included advice on costing to ensure proposals include realistic financial budgets to allow full cost recovery, carrying out a number of donor audits, including some audits in other countries where the projects were operating from. We assisted to ensure that donors’ requirements, such as procurement, reporting and recording are met with ease. More recently haysmacintyre has advised on the internal audit work carried out by the client’s in-house audit team. We worked with the team to draw up a three year plan and assisted in devising templates for the work in each area and countries where they had major projects.

Flexible outsourcing for a not for profit entity with a supportive and collaborative working method

Our client took the decision on the retirement of their book keeper to consider outsourcing some of their bookkeeping and accounting responsibilities. They chose to host the accounting software and wanted the opportunity to retain some of the responsibility themselves for the preparation of their records in house.

We provide a flexible solution based on their needs. We have advised them on the set up of their accounting system and complete their accounting records once they have made initial postings. We then prepare monthly management accounts including department reporting and provide training and support to the staff member responsible for making some of the accounting entries.