Balance Sheets explained
Understanding your financial position
Introduction
Every board should be receiving their Balance Sheet at least on a quarterly basis. They are a quick and easy way to see if your organisation is solvent and able to meet its obligations. It allows you to make informed decisions about reserves, debt, investments, etc.
With Balance Sheets you can:
Understand the value of what people owe to you and what you owe to others
See your split between restricted and unrestricted funds
View your bottom line at any given time
Though the language used can be hard to understand if you aren’t familiar with accounting jargon. To help with this, we’ve produced a downloadable explainer PDF that you can save for future reference, as well as a video walkthrough and transcript.
Download
Click the button below to download our one-page explainer.
(Size: 80KB, Format: PDF)
Demo video
In the video below, we walk you through how to interpret Balance Sheets.
Download transcript (Size: 24KB, Format: Microsoft Word)
Further support
If you need any help with our resources, feel free to contact us. We are happy to explain them and offer training. We can even redesign the tools a bit, perhaps expand them or develop new features, because these resources are fairly basic tools and they're not designed for everyone.
You may need to amend the tools yourself a little bit to suit your individual needs as an organisation, and we would encourage you to adapt them and make the resources work for you.
We hope you enjoy them and find them useful. Providing free advice and resources helps us achieve our own charitable goal, which is to help organisations run themselves more efficiently and effectively.
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