Sharing monthly figures with the board
How a non-profit shares monthly management accounts with board members who need no login, using PDF exports, expiring links and read-only access.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Non-profit businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Most non-profit boards are made up of volunteers: a retired banker, a community leader, a lawyer who gives an evening a month, a parent from the programme. They carry real responsibility for the organisation's money, and they need to see the figures every month. What most of them do not need is a login to the accounting system, with its donor names, staff salaries and every bank line.
Separating "seeing the figures" from "having access to the books" protects the organisation and makes life easier for trustees. This article covers how to get monthly figures to the board from Achekam without handing out logins, how to share them safely, and when a board member genuinely needs to look at the ledger itself.
Why most board members do not need a login
A board's job is oversight: are we within budget, can we pay our bills, are restricted funds being spent as agreed, is anything unusual happening? The management accounts answer those questions. The ledger, with every transaction, is the finance officer's and the accountant's working tool.
Giving every trustee a login brings risks that outweigh the convenience:
- more people with access to donor and payroll details than the organisation can justify;
- logins that outlive a trustee's term because nobody remembers to remove them;
- trustees drawing conclusions from unreviewed transactions halfway through a month;
- one more set of credentials to be lost, shared or phished.
AccountingTools' definition of management accounting describes the internal reporting that tracks revenues, expenses, variances and other measures to help managers act. A monthly board pack built from management accounts is exactly that kind of reporting, prepared for the people who must act on it.
Management accounts downloaded as PDF or CSV
Achekam's management accounts show an income statement for a chosen period beside the period before, and a balance sheet at period end, both added up from the organisation's own journals and exportable as PDF or CSV.
For the board, the PDF is usually the right format: a fixed record of the figures as they stood when the pack was prepared, which can be filed with the minutes. The CSV is useful for the treasurer or finance committee who want to build their own comparisons.
One setting to watch: the year-to-date preset starts on 1 January, not on the organisation's own year start. If your financial year begins in March, April or July, set the dates yourself, or the year-to-date column will not match your budget year; year to date when your year is your own explains how.
A good monthly pack is short:
| Page | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Summary | Three or four sentences from the finance officer on what changed and why |
| Income statement | The month and the year so far against the prior period |
| Balance sheet | Cash, what is owed to and by the organisation, and funds held |
| Grant tracker | Each restricted grant's budget, spending and balance |
| Questions for the board | Decisions needed, such as approving a budget change |
A personal link with an expiry, an optional code and downloads blocked
Sending the pack as an e-mail attachment means copies sit in personal inboxes indefinitely, sometimes on shared family computers. Achekam's Document Centre gives you a better way.
Upload the month's pack to a board folder in Document Centre, where files can be organised in folders, tagged, searched, and a new version keeps the earlier ones. Then share it. A document can be shared by e-mailing a personal link with an expiry, an optional one-time code, and download allowed or not; and the share can be revoked.
For a board pack, sensible settings are:
- an expiry a few days after the meeting;
- a one-time code, so a forwarded e-mail does not open the pack;
- downloads blocked for packs that include salary or donor detail, allowed for summary packs the board may want to keep.
Read-only review access for the few who need the ledger
Some trustees do need to look deeper: the treasurer, the chair of the audit and finance committee, or an independent finance adviser to the board. For them, a login with read-only rights makes sense.
When an accounting firm is appointed to an organisation's books in Achekam, review access is read-only, while bookkeeping access covers the accounting but not the organisation's users, settings or payment gateways. If your treasurer is a member of an accounting firm, appointing that firm with review access gives the read-only view without any power to change the books. For other trustees who need a login, give them the most limited rights your administrator can set, and record the decision in the minutes.
Keep that group small and named. The default for every other board member is the shared pack.
Revoking links after the meeting
A board pack has a natural life: from circulation to the end of the meeting, plus a short period for questions. After that, the link has done its job.
Make revoking shares part of the minutes routine:
- After the meeting, the finance officer revokes the pack's share links.
- The final version, with any corrections agreed at the meeting, is filed in the board folder.
- The minutes record which version of the pack was considered.
A board month, in words
A conservation trust's finance officer closes the month, exports the management accounts as PDF, and adds a one-page summary and the grant tracker. She uploads the pack to the board folder and shares it by personal link with the trustees, with a code and an expiry two days after the meeting. The treasurer, who has a read-only login, checks two unusual items in the ledger before the meeting. Afterwards the finance officer revokes the links and files the final pack with the minutes.
Setting up the routine
Agree with the chair what the monthly pack contains, create a board folder in Document Centre, and decide which one or two trustees, if any, need read-only access. When the board needs to approve something formally between meetings, board resolutions signed electronically shows how to get it signed without a meeting.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
