As an Executive Director or Board member of a child care centre, you are responsible for:
- Provincial grant funding compliance
- CRA filing and remittance obligations (payroll, GST, T3010 if a charity)
- Financial reporting to your Board of Directors
- The annual review or audit, depending on funding requirements
The children are the focus. The financials should not be a second job.
Where we help child care centres
- Year-end financial statement preparation
- Presenting financial statements to the Board or at the AGM
- Independent audit or review engagements as required by funders
- Bookkeeping (full-cycle or oversight)
- Payroll services
- Budget preparation and consultation
- Financial projections and cash-flow forecasts
- Charitable returns (T3010) preparation and filing
Charitable status: where centres get into trouble
For registered charities, CRA imposes specific rules about what counts as a charitable activity, how to issue donation receipts, and what records have to be kept. Common areas where centres run into compliance issues:
- Activities that drift outside the registered charitable purpose
- Donation receipts issued for amounts that include a benefit to the donor
- Receipting for services rather than for cash or eligible property
- Insufficient documentation of disbursement quota compliance
- Late T3010 filings (the most common reason for revocation of charitable status)
We advise on each of these and review your filings before they go out, so the charity stays compliant and the receipts you issue stand up to CRA review.
Working with the Board
Many Board members are volunteers without a finance background. Presenting numbers to them in a useful way is its own skill. We help Executive Directors structure their monthly and annual financial reporting so the Board gets the information it needs to govern without drowning in detail. Where helpful, we present directly to the Board on technical matters such as audit findings, charitable compliance, or budget assumptions.
Alberta funding context
Funded centres in Alberta operate under provincial child care subsidy and grant programs administered by the Government of Alberta. Compliance with grant funding terms, kindergarten readiness program reporting, and operating grants all flow through into the annual financial statements. We work with the funding terms in mind when we prepare statements and audits, so the documents you submit to your funders match what funders expect to see.
Getting started
We typically start with a conversation to understand your centre’s structure, funding sources, and current financial practices. From there we propose the right combination of services with a quoted fee. No engagement starts before the scope and the cost are agreed.