(a charitable company limited by guarantee)
Registered Charity No. 1054914
Company Number 3182826
In our budget for the 2005/6 we anticipated a surplus of £40,000 on unrestricted funds. We managed to achieve a surplus of over £90,000. This was due to the tight control of expenditure, having a successful member recruitment drive and exceeding our budgeted surplus on all our major events (the IT Conference, Risk Conference, Main Conference and Annual Dinner). During 2005/6, excluding donated services, overall expenditure increased by about 17% whilst net incoming resources increased by 28%.
Our key areas of income are membership fees (which includes the subscriber fees that our corporate supporters pay), events, training, and policy. Membership income increased from £312,331 in 2005 to £376,453 in 2006. This 21% increase was due to roughly 10% growth in members and 18% growth in corporate subscribers. We also increased subscriber fees by 20%. Although half of our income comes from membership fees it is essential for future growth to diversify income sources and develop reliable income streams. We have been awarded a £60,000 grant from the Charities Aid Foundation Collaborative Fund over three years from 2006. We will use this money to take forward our regional development.
As per last year’s report we applied for two grants from government but were unsuccessful in both cases. However we were very successful in working with our traditional supporter base of corporate partners, as a result of this we increased our non-membership fee income, as a percentage of total income, from 48% in 2005 to 51% in 2006.
Policy and campaigning income is down on last year as the Pensions Project was completed in 2005 and we had no major policy project during this year. There was also less activity during the year on policy.
The increase in expenditure from unrestricted funds (again, excluding donated services) was 21%, compared to a 29% growth in unrestricted income. Our salaries bill and number of staff stayed broadly the same, although our employee related costs increased to £55,343 from £10,902 in 2005. This was partly due to increased training costs but was largely a result of recruitment costs for the six posts that were recruited during the year, including that of CEO. Apart from this all the growth was in direct service provision and it reflects the remarkably busy year we had.
The restricted fund is made up only of the ongoing depreciation of fixed assets on the CRN project. The restricted funds carried forward (£14,583) represent the net book value of fixed assets relating to the CRN.
The unrestricted general fund ended the year up from £150,452 to £241,298, an increase of over 60%. This means that we have already met the target of the Trustees’ policy of building up the reserves to an appropriate level (see reserves policy below).
All staff are directly engaged in activities in furtherance of the objects of CFDG and their cost has been allocated accordingly. Governance costs – which include an allowance for the value of donated venues and refreshments – were reduced by 16% as we were no longer developing our new three-year strategic plan. The cost of generating funds relates solely to putting on our Annual Fundraising Dinner, which raised over £76,000 in support of our unrestricted programme.
We incurred irrecoverable VAT of just over £22,000; however we were also able to make a one-off claim for £12,000 as a result of a re-calculation of our partial exemption figures over the past three years.
Page 10 - Annual Report and Financial Statements 2006