These financial statement excerpts illustrate the article, “Tracking Volunteer Time to Improve Your Bottom Line: A Complete Accounting Guide,” by Dennis Walsh, CPA. See the full article here.
By reporting donated nursing and medical social worker services of $120,000, total public support (before earned revenue) increases from $250,000 to $370,000, or 48%. We also see that inclusion of these services in program expense increases the spending efficiency ratio from 80% to 83%.
Hometown Hospice Care explains the nature of recognized services, as required by GAAP, in the following footnote to its financial statements:
Note 2: The organization recognizes contribution revenue for certain services received at the fair value of such services. Recognized services were provided by 5 medical social workers and 4 registered nurses as follows:
By adding this supplemental data, we see that Hometown Hospice Care has far greater volunteer support than indicated by the minimum GAAP disclosures alone. The user of the financial statements takes away a better sense of the amount of public support for programs as well as the diverse range of volunteer supported activities.
See the full article here.
Would we count the services of nursing students doing their practicum work as skilled time? They do assessments and primary health care for our meals recipients. They are not yet in possession of the RN and are supervised by their proff. They do work that, if we didn’t have them- we would pay someone to do. However, we would not pay a skilled person as the in-depth assessments they do are not required, just nice to have available.
Thank you
You cannot add the value of donated services without also subtracting the incurred costs of managing the volunteers. Managing human resources, paid or unpaid, is very expensive.
RE: 07/20/2010 – 15:09.
….VOLUNTEER HOURS spent “in working in governance of the organization, however you should include committee/project service time.”…
QUESTION: Where can the official definition of organizational governance be referenced.
Please email the answer to PetAnd40@yahoo.com
Do you have an opinion on how to record board member volunteer service time? I have heard some say that you should not include the time they spend in working in governance of the organization, however you should include committee/project service time. It doesn’t make sense to me to separate these two areas. I would appreciate hearing your opinion.
I enjoyed your article and have a question for you. The majority of our volunteers are vision screeners. The volunteer position does require screeners to be trained and certified and if we did not have the volunteers, we would have to hire screeners. My question is, does the fact that the screeners must be trained and certified satisfy the SFAS 116 requirement of “requiring special skills” or must their “special skills” be their principal occupation?
A very important article that all NFP need to hear. Volunteers are also covered under the organizations’ general liability or Workman’s comp. policies. Properly documenting their time is necessary.
Gary Pigg, MBA
garypigg@vbct.com