INDIA | Volunteer Accountant @ Social Enterprise

Our partner are a social enterprise set up to better prepare India’s youth for life after school; they support existing college and high school students with employability training, leadership development, and career services.

Currently in India students from low-income and rural backgrounds struggle to find quality employment opportunities after graduation and our partner attempts to address this employability gap.

You will be the third AfID volunteer on assignment to support this organisation. We partnered with them at the initial stages of its development; over the past two years, it has grown quite prominently as an organisation. In 2013/14, they had 60 students, in 2014/15, this went up to 500. In 2015/16, they are looking at have 2,000 students enrolled in their programme. They are now working with 25 higher education and expanded to work in 6 districts. The first volunteer spent just over 5 weeks with them in July 2014. His role was to assess their accounting processes and financial controls; train the accountant on creating and monitoring budgets, and preparing reports and; help them make the most of their accounting system, Tally. The second volunteer also undertook an assessment of their processes and controls, checked if the first volunteer’s recommendations had been implemented and supported them in budget creation and monitoring on Tally.

As part of their donor commitments, they were audited last month. For the most part, the audit recommendations were good. The auditors recommended that they create consolidated accounts. At present, whilst all their programmes and work is in India, they do have a US entity, where they receive funding, and from which they spend money on projects, office costs and staff salaries. They do not have a complete picture of organisational finances, and would like the support of a volunteer in helping them create and understand consolidated accounts.

With their expansion, their programmes officers are travelling extensively; the co-founder is also travelling more for fundraising. They would like a volunteer to review their processes and controls, specifically around transport.

They have a member of staff focussing on accounting/finance; however, he does not have formal accounting background, and as they expand they are looking to define roles and responsibilities within the organisation. They would like the volunteer’s advice on how best to structure the finance team – whether they should hire someone experienced/senior, if that is possible given their budget and going salaries, or whether they should hire someone at a bookkeeping level, and train up the Finance Manager they have.

They have requested the support of a volunteer for 3-4 weeks, and will provide accommodation and food in a guesthouse located very close to the office.

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