This blog is going to be more of a brain dump! I’m not entirely sure what’s going to come out of this one but here goes! So here’s some background on what’s been floating around in my head of late:
The past two years have seen enormous growth in my little bookkeeping business for which I am very grateful. We are doing so well in fact, that I now feel that it’s time to give something back to the community to show my gratitude. So for the past few months, I have been wondering about my options for “giving back”. Being so busy now in the practice, it’s not really possible for me to give of my time per SE so I have been looking at some alternatives. Something I am playing with (currently only in my head!) is a donation of a percentage of our profits. The way I am thinking this might work is described below.
I am thinking that my giving program could work along the lines of this (again, this is only in it’s very early stages, so nothing is concrete as yet):
- Choose 4 or 5 high profile charities who would be the recipients of the donations e.g. St Vincent de Paul, RSPCA (or other animal charity – has to be an animal charity in there somewhere because I love, love, love animals!), Ronald McDonald House or Royal Children’s Hospital (dear to my heart), maybe something like #FightMND, Red Cross, Beyond Blue or Make a Wish Foundation. There are so many charities, so many to choose from – this would be the hard part of the process me thinks!
- Donate a percentage of each client’s invoice (every invoice) to one of these charities. Of course, deciding on that percentage figure will not be easy – still working on that aspect!
- Either ask each client which charity they would like me to donate to on their behalf, or choose for them – not sure just yet!
- Set up our systems such that at the end of each month it will just be a simple matter of running a report to see the total amounts donated to each charity.
- Either pay the donations to each charity manually via EFT/Bpay each month or set up some sort of direct debit arrangement instead (see next point).
- The direct debit arrangement option would involve me donating the same amount each month regardless of the total amounts donated by client invoices. At the end of each financial year, I would do a reconciliation and if this resulted in e-BAS Accounts donating more than what was actually donated by client invoices, then I would wear that result nominating the extra funds as an e-BAS Accounts specific donation. If however, I found that fewer funds were paid into charities than donated across the year by client invoices, then, of course, I would pay the difference.
So that’s a basic run-down of how I would organise this giving program. As you can see, there is still a lot of organising to do and arrangements to be made. I haven’t even told many clients about this because it’s still so green in my mind. However, I definitely think this could be a great idea and certainly a good way to give back.
What do you think about this idea? Do you have any thoughts or comments about it? Do you have a favourite charity you think I should add to my list? If anything here strikes a chord with you, please add your comments below – I’d love the input as I really need to clarify a few things in my mind about all of this before making it a reality.
