Opening remarks
Jayne Rowe, Partner at PEM

Beyond the risk register. Managing strategic and operational risks as a small charity
Charities with small teams can often find themselves focusing on the urgent at the expense of the important. This session will help you find the ‘sweet spot’ between risk mitigation and resource constraints by managing strategic and operational risks in a highly practical way.

Liz Pepler, Founding Director of Embrace Finance

Panel Session: Independent Examinations
This panel session will explore how to pick your examiner, and the essentials that your examiner needs to know. We will share findings from ICAEW's review of the quality of independent examinations of member firms and tips on how to get it right as an examiner. You will also learn what to look for when selecting an independent examiner for your charity.

Angela Freeman, ICAEW, Nigel Davies, Michael Brougham

How to prepare budgets for funding bids
Many small charities need to rebuild their reserves following the pandemic, but funding is often insufficient to cover all the charity’s support costs.

This session will teach you how to prepare funding bids that are full cost recovery. You will learn to apply realistic day rates for direct project staff and get buy-in from funders to fund projects using full cost recovery principles.

Mark Salway, Associate at Moore Kingston Smith, Nonprofit Advisory 

VAT risks for smaller charities
Most charities are not large yet can find themselves either missing out on available VAT reliefs or vulnerable to substantial VAT errors. This session flags some of the issues that commonly cause problems in relation to VAT but are not widely understood.

Les Howard, VAT Consultant at vatadvice.org

Scenario planning in an inflationary environment using Excel
While most charities are used to uncertainty in their income projections, high inflation has introduced volatility into expenditure projection with a rise in salaries, energy, and other costs often unavoidable. This session will show how to use Excel for scenario planning to account for uncertainty in your charity’s financial plans during a period of increasing inflation.

John Tennent, Regional Director Europe, Middle East and Africa at Corporate Edge 

Talking about Reserves: engaging the whole Board
How do you involve non-financial trustees in conversations about reserves? This session will equip you with the skills to share your financial knowledge and involve the whole board in setting a reserves target range and policy that all trustees understand and that meets your charity’s needs.

Rachel Cooper, Principal at Welbeck

Michael Brougham MCBI FCIE
Michael is a practising independent examiner, trainer and charity accounts adviser with 50 years’ experience in charity accounting and finance. He is also a member of the Charities' SORP Committee and the SORP Committee's engagement strand for smaller charities and Independent Examiners and a fellow of the ACIE.

Rachel Cooper, Principal at Welbeck
Rachel is a chartered accountant with over 25 years’ experience working with charities and social enterprises of all shapes and sizes, but she is at her happiest working with small charities. She has enjoyed some really great roles throughout her career, and now appreciates the opportunity to share her knowledge, and support others to learn and grow.

Nigel Davies, FCCA DChA
Nigel is a Chartered Certified Accountant with over twenty years’ experience in the charity sector. He is a member of the IFR4NPO Practitioner Advisory Group, Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Charities Special Interest Group, and the ACCA Charity Trustees’ Panel and has published a number of discussion papers on topical accountancy issues with ACCA. He provides consultancy advice on charity financial reporting, regulation and governance and is a speaker at charity sector conferences and events.

Prior to taking up consultancy in March 2022, Nigel was Assistant Director, Accountancy Services, at the Charity Commission for England and Wales leading the team of accountants delivering the accountancy input to policy development, external engagement and regulatory and inquiry casework. He was Joint Chair of the UK-Ireland Charities SORP Committee and co-author of the Charities Statement of Recommended Practice (FRS 102) which is the authoritative interpretation of UK-Ireland Generally Accepted Accounting Practice for charity financial reporting. Nigel was also the principal author of the 2015 ACCA Companion Guide for Not-for-profits to the International Financial Reporting Standard for Small and Medium-sized Entities (IFRS for SMEs) which was the first global reporting initiative for non-profits.

Angela Freeman FCA CTA at ICAEW
Angela could be described as a ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’. She joined the Quality Assurance Department of ICAEW in 2005, having previously been a partner in a small firm providing a range of services, mostly to owner managed businesses. Prior to that she worked for three of the larger firms of accountants, specialising in tax for several years.

She leads a team who carry out Practice Assurance, audit and DPB monitoring visits to a range of firms, including Practice Assurance visits to the many of the top 20 firms. She also carries out anti-money laundering monitoring visits to firms that have special contracts with ICAEW.

Les Howard, VAT Consultant at vatadvice.org
Les Howard founded vatadvice.org back in 1994, having worked for HM Customs & Excise (as it was then called) and then a Management Consultancy business.

Les is delighted that vatadvice.org now constitutes a small team of VAT Consultants, allowing him to slowly step back. The focus of the business is in supporting Charities through the complexities of VAT. Les frequently delivers VAT training and also sits as a non-legal member of the Tax Tribunal.

Liz Pepler, founding Director of Embrace Finance
Liz is the founding Director of Embrace Finance, a non-profit social enterprise working with charitable foundations, registered charities, and social enterprises. Drawing on over 20 years’ experience, Liz specialises in building the financial confidence and financial resilience of smaller organisations with an income of up to £1m. She has worked at senior leadership level with a range of organisations including grant-makers, infrastructure bodies and fundraising charities.

Liz holds an MSc in Charity Accounting and Financial Management, an ICSA PG Certificate in Charity Management and an ILM 7 award in Strategic Leadership and Management. She is Treasurer of the Association of Chairs.

Jayne Rowe, Partner at PEM
Jayne joined PEM as Partner in May 2018 and is Head of Charity and Not For Profit working with organisations of all sizes. Having trained in a small firm in Hertford, Jayne joined Deloitte in 1999 and worked with a wide range of both corporate, charities and pension scheme clients, before specialising in the charities and not for profit sector. Jayne finds working with charities and not for profit organisations both inspiring and rewarding, “every client is unique which makes every day different”. Because PEM are fully committed to the charity and not for profit sector, Jayne finds she can offer her clients pragmatic and practical solutions across a range of services including audit, accounts, training and governance reviews.

Mark Salway, Associate at Moore Kingston Smith, Nonprofit Advisory
For the past three years, Mark has led the firm’s team of experts in fundraising, financial sustainability, impact measurement and strategic planning as Managing Director. As an expert in costing structures and finance strategy, Mark looks at cost recovery and overheads, reserve policies, optimism bias and aligning finances with an organisation’s choices and priorities.

Highly respected across the nonprofit sector, Mark has extensive charity and industry experience gained both in the UK and abroad. On the industry side, he specialises in change management, strategic planning and managerial finance, having spent seven years at KPMG.

His work with charities, government, NGOs and the UN includes humanitarian reform, the elderly, homelessness, children’s welfare, dementia, water and sanitation, sport and developing social enterprise, including eight years as finance director at Care International UK.  

Outside of the office, he lectures widely and regularly speaks at charity conferences. He continues to teach professional development courses at Bayes Business School’s Centre for Charity Effectiveness.

John Tennent, Regional Director Europe, Middle East and Africa at Corporate Edge
John provides a wide range of business courses though specialises in strategic financial planning, business modelling and investment appraisal.

His background is in finance, starting his career as a Chartered Accountant with Deloitte & Touche in 1983. He went onto become the Financial Controller of a US bank before joining a training consultancy as Client Director. He co-founded Corporate Edge in 1996.

He is the author of the Economist Guide to Business Modelling, the Economist Guide to Financial Management and the Economist Guide to Cash Management. He is a member of the ICAEW’s Charity Committee and the Excel Advisory Committee, Honorary Treasurer of the Air Ambulance Service and the MedicAlert Foundation UK & Ireland, and member of RSPCA’s Finance, Audit and Risk Committee. Previously he was Honorary Treasurer at Samaritans and at Helen & Douglas House.