- Where does Benefacts get its financial and governance information about nonprofits?
- Why are the names of directors published on benefacts.ie?
- Where does Benefacts get the description of the purposes for which each listed organisation was established?
- How does Benefacts get its financial analysis?
- Listings missing financial information
- Where does the information about government funding come from?
1. Where does Benefacts get its financial and governance information about nonprofits?
As a condition of their registration as companies and/or as charities, nonprofits are required to provide regulatory bodies with a copy of their constitution, the names of their directors/trustees and other information including a set of financial statements. Benefacts extracts the relevant information from these documents and stores it in its database. Up-to-date extracts are published on benefacts.ie as soon as these are made available by the Regulator or Registrar in question.
2. Why are the names of directors published on benefacts.ie?
When a company is formed, its directors undertake to comply with company law. This includes a provision that requires the disclosure of directors’ names in their own company literature, and on the public website of the Companies Registration Office (CRO). Similar obligations fall on the trustees of charities. Benefacts republishes this information on benefacts.ie. If you have concerns about the accuracy or the presentation of this information, contact us.
3. Where does Benefacts get the description of the purposes for which each listed organisation was established?
Benefacts captures an extract from the constitution (where available) or the statement of charitable purposes of each nonprofit in scope, and reproduces this on benefacts.ie. The data capture process is called optical character recognition (OCR), and occasionally it gets spellings or punctuation slightly wrong. If you have concerns about the accuracy or the presentation of this information, contact us.
4. How does Benefacts get its financial analysis?
Benefacts extracts a lot of relevant information from the published financial statements of Irish nonprofits. In the first release of its website, Benefacts has provided data extracted from the financial statements for 2014 – this also includes financial data from 2014. Later in the year, data from 2015 accounts will be input, to update the listings on the website.
In most cases, the financial statements give a picture of where organisations’ funding comes from, and what they spend it on. Benefacts presents financial information in this format: total income, total expenditure, total net assets, showing the prior year details, and the % difference. Sometimes net assets are shown as a negative value, signifying that the liabilities exceed the assets.
Benefacts also presents information about the sources of funding, derived from the financial statements:
- government funding (which may take the form of grants or service fees)
- funding from other sources (including private or corporate donations, or philanthropic grants, or funding received from overseas)
- earned revenues (from sources other than government) – these include fees, ticket sales, etc.
- unspecified income (where no details have been provided in the financial statements about the source of income).
5. Listings missing financial information
For most nonprofits that are incorporated, Benefacts has access to the organisation’s financial statements and has been able to extract detailed financial information. The document from which Benefacts has derived the financial analysis is available in the footer of the organisation’s page on benefacts.ie. Sometimes, the financial statements have been made available but no summary is presented on the nonprofit’s
Sometimes, the financial statements have been made available but no summary is presented on the nonprofit’s benefacts.ie listing – this is usually because the accounts have been published in an abridged format or – occasionally – the listing may have been temporarily redacted at the request of the organisation in question while Benefacts addresses a query or concern. In cases where financial data or financial statements are not available, this is because there is no regulatory requirement on the nonprofit in question to place these in the public domain.
6. Where does the information about government funding come from?
Every nonprofit receiving public funding is required to report on the sources of their income in their financial statements, and many do this in the notes to the statements. Benefacts harvests this data, and aggregates it as between income received from named or un-named government sources (some organisations simply report “government funding”), funding from non-government sources, and all other income.