AASB Research Report 19 Common Financial Statement Items: Charities with $0.5–$3 million in revenue

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

The AASB published a research report to identify common financial items recorded in the financial statements of charities in Australia. The findings are intended to provide input for the AASB’s development of a new reporting tier project, Tier 3 general purpose financial statements. The project aims to provide simpler accounting requirements for smaller not-for-profit private sector entities.

Research Report 19 identifies the most common (and by extension, least) financial line items from 260 financial statements of charities registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission with revenue ranging from $0.5 million to $3 million. The analyses show that the majority of these charities' (78%) financial statements were special purpose financial statements and only a few charities prepared consolidated financial statements. The analyses indicated that the most commonly reported:

• revenue items are interest income, donation income, revenue from goods and services, grants, and government subsidies;
• asset items are cash and cash equivalents, trade and other receivables, fixed assets, and prepayments;
• liabilities items are trade and other payables, long service leave provisions, annual leave provisions, and revenues received in advance;
• equity item is retained earnings.

The least common items identified are rebates, impairment loss, revaluation of property, plant and equipment, prior period adjustments, other types of comprehensive income, intangible assets, lease receivables, investment property, other types of assets, and other types of liabilities.

The research also found that the vast majority of the sampled charities presented statements of changes in equity and statements of cash flows.