When you make a donation to a charity, you have every right to know how that money will be used. We want to be as transparent as possible about our finances in order to reassure all of our wonderful donors that we are using their money wisely and effectively to help as many Vizslas as possible.
You can view our charity details and financial information on the Charity Commission’s public register of charities – please do have a look…
Our 2022-23 income and expenditure is listed separately below. Our 2023-24 accounts are not finalised yet, but expenditure last year was just over £50,000.
As the figures show, several times our outgoings have been more than our income, due to a variety of unforeseen emergencies. We do maintain reserves for just such situations, as well as to ensure the charity’s overall financial resilience, however we are very keen to reassure our supporters that we will never ‘hoard’ money unnecessarily. Further information can be found in our official Reserves Policy.
As you can see from our financial breakdown, our general running costs are very low – just under 4.5% of our total outgoings. We do not have any official premises to maintain, and we do not have any salaried staff. We are all volunteers working from our own homes. This means that over 95p of every pound we spend goes directly towards helping the dogs in our care.
Vet bills are our largest expense; many of the dogs surrendered to us for rehoming have medical conditions that are not covered by insurance, and we are always happy to pay for veterinary treatment that will allow a dog to live a happy and healthy life.
Our 2022-23 income was unusually high thanks to an unexpected and wonderfully generous donation of £20,000 from the Primrose Trust. As you can see from the figures, without this amazing windfall our income would have been £65,000, against outgoings of £64,000.
In addition to this, we finally got on top of our Gift Aid backlog – apologies if you are one of the many people we pestered repeatedly about a Gift Aid form but as you can see it really does make up a large chunk of our income!
If you have any questions about our finances, our accounts, or how we spend our money, please do get in touch.