Accounting shared services and its feasibility for implementation in charities.

Our research paper aims to obtain a deeper understanding of the issues that charities encounter with the accounting regulatory requirements and explore the feasibility of outsourcing accounting function to alleviate the problems identified. Through this research, we hope to be able to contribute by helping regulatory bodies understand the struggles of charities to meet accounting requirements and to cater solutions to help alleviate the problems. We conducted a descriptive study using various research instruments including interviews, surveys as well as secondary data collection. We conducted surveys targeted at donors and potential employees (particularly the accountants), two of the primary stakeholders, in order to get a representative view of their take on the various issues surrounding charities. Surveys are also conducted for charities, with additional interviews conducted with several charities of different sizes in order to get a deeper understanding of the challenges they face. Our findings indicated that accountants are generally receptive to working in a charity, and are willing to do so because of reasons like wanting to give back to society. At the same time, those who are unwilling to work may be deterred by factors such as uncompetitive pay. For the donors, they do demand for information from charities, and factors which would influence their decision whether to donate to a charity would include the charity’s reputation as well as the credibility of its management. Meanwhile, results from the survey with charities suggest that there is no uniform consensus on whether there would be difficulties in complying with the recent regulatory changes. On the topic of outsourcing, there are differing views. The larger charities indicate that outsourcing would not be useful for them.BUSINES