Skip to content
Whisper Wiki

Putting Whisper's Accounts Online (archived)

This page is obsolete because Whisper UG now uses a PC-based package for its accounts and Whisper UK uses Excel, but it’s kept for reference.

Whisper is going to need an accounting package. Requirements are:

  • cloud-based
  • multi-currency (if to be used in Uganda as well)
  • perhaps, allows us to keep accounts for two organisations (UK charity and Ugandan NGO)
  • allows tracking of restricted donations
  • allows expenses to be submitted via a mobile phone

There’s a discussion of accounting packages for small businesses here.

Some potential candidates for Whisper are:

  • Reckon - Very very cheap, e.g. a few ££ per month for unlimited payroll. Big in Australia, tried to grow in UK but pulled out.
  • Xero - 25% discount for charities, and Xero mentions a discount for “multiple organisations”, possibly 15%.
  • Quickbooks
  • Sage Live (free for charities, runs on the Salesforce platform; they never responded to my enquiry)
  • Quickfile (free)

Xero would cost £35 a month after charity discount and multi-organisation discount (we would need 2 licences, one for the UK charity and one for the Ugandan NGO). There will be an additional £3 per month cost for a Barclays Dataservices feed from the UK Barclays Bank account to automatically log transactions into Xero. There’s an alternative third party bank feed which is free but we’d either need to give Whisper’s bank login to the third party feed (noooo!) or log in manually now and then to allow the third party feed to run; there have been a few complaints about the reliability of the third party feed so the Barclays feed may be the way to go.

A reason for choosing Xero over the other solutions, some of which are free, is that there’s very good support for Xero from consultants on freelance platforms such as https://www.fiverr.com. So I think when labour costs are taken into account Xero could work out cheaper than the free solutions.

here is a draft chart of accounts (list of headings under which we want to record income and expenditure).

What we don’t want to do is to overcomplicate things. Whisper has very simple requirements for its statutory accounts as submitted to the Charity Commission; they are really just a few lines that could be obtained by totalling up Whisper’s bank statements. Xero will help with the statutory accounts but it’s mainly about management accounting - giving everybody an idea of where the money is coming from and going to - and helping to ensure that the restricted funds are actually spent where they’re supposed to be. We could do with some consultancy from somebody who is familiar with small charity accounts before we implement Xero.

It may be that having good management accounts will make it easier to raise funds, but it would be good to have confirmation of that from somebody with a lot of experience of small charities.