A guide to reconciling your Sport England revenue award

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1 A guide to reconciling your Sport England revenue award

2 Award reconciliation Revenue awards What is award reconciliation? Whenever Sport England releases money for an award we need to see evidence that it has been spent on the items that were agreed as part of your application. This is called reconciliation or evidence of spend. Delays in paying claims can be avoided if the reconciliation of your award is correct and easy to understand. Complex, confusing or incorrect reconciliation can delay the release of any money significantly. When do I reconcile my award? For revenue claims you need to reconcile your project costs every 6 months, each time you submit a Claim and reconciliation form. We would expect you to submit a 6 Monthly Project Cost Reconciliation & Claim Form half way through your project year and an Annual Project Cost Reconciliation & Claim Form at the end of your project year. With each Claim and reconciliation form you submit you are effectively reconciling the previous 6 months of your project. You need to reconcile your total project costs and not just the money you have received from Sport England. How do I reconcile my award? You use the Project Cost Reconciliation and Claim Form to inform us of your total project spend, using the Total expenditure for the period section. In the Year budget column you put your project budget for the year. This should match exactly the information you submitted on your Project Budget Forecast form. In the Actual spend column you state how much in total you have spent on your project. This is all money spent on your whole project including cash and in-kind partnership funding. Reconciling only the award you received from Sport England is insufficient. Normally the amount in the Actual spend column on the 6 Monthly claim form will be approximately 50% of the yearly budget although we realise this may not always be the case. On the Annual claim form the amount in the Actual spend column should be 100% of the yearly budget. Obviously these amounts may not be exactly the same but as long as they are within approximately 5% of the budget amount this will be acceptable. If your actual spend is outside of this 5% variance figure please read the section titled What if my budget has changed? later on in this guide.

3 To reconcile your Actual spend you need to send in with your claim invoices and/or cost centre readouts clearly showing eligible expenditure. In order to ensure that the payment of your claim is not delayed in any way it is in your best interest to make sure that the invoices and/or cost centre readouts can easily be matched against the amounts on the claim form. For example, if the claim form states that 30,000 was spent on Staff costs all of the invoices and/or cost centre readouts relevant to staff costs should be put together and clearly labelled. They should also total 30,000. If any of your invoices and cost centre readouts have payments relevant to more than one budget item, i.e. staff costs, hire of facilities and coaches fees, each individual payment would need to be highlighted, labelled or colour coded so that it can be easily identified. The above steps would need to be followed for each budget item. What if my project costs include In-kind reconciliation? If any of the actual spend was provided in the form of in-kind partnership funding this still needs to be reconciled. This can be done by the partnership funder providing invoices and/or cost centre readouts. If this is not possible then a signed letter on headed paper from the partnership funder needs to be submitted. This letter must provide a detailed breakdown of what in-kind funding was provided and the value of each element. What are cost centre readouts? Cost centre readouts are produced from computerised accounting systems. They are normally produced by running a report which lists payments made from a specific budget or cost centre. Submitting print outs or screen shots is acceptable but it is important that all the relevant information can be seen i.e. cost codes and payment amounts. Some accounting systems allow the report to be exported into Microsoft Excel. This is acceptable as long as all the relevant information can still be seen. Using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet which has not been generated by a computerised accounting system to reconcile your award is not acceptable. What if my budget has changed? If, when you submit your Annual claim form, you are outside the 5% variance amount you will need to provide an explanation why this is. If you have not spent as much as you forecast (an underspend) then you will not be able to claim all of your award for that year of your project. However, this does not necessarily mean that you lose your unclaimed award. It may be possible for you to carry over the unclaimed amount into the next year of your project or use it to extend your project.

4 For example, the first year of your three year award is for 10k to employ a sports coach. If for some reason you only employed a coach for 9 months you could only claim 7.5k. However, you could request to employ an additional coach for 3 months during year 2 of your project, or extend your project by 3 months so that it runs for 3 years and 3 months. To change your award in this way you would need to get it approved by Sport England in advance. We would normally expect you to do this when you submit your Annual claim form and we would expect to see a new Project Budget Forecast, form reflecting your new project costs. If you have spent more than you forecast (an overspend) we would need you to tell us who has provided the additional funding to cover the additional costs. Normally a covering letter submitted with your Annual claim form will be enough to do this, however, we may ask for more information in certain circumstances. What if I submit my claim late? Sport England wants you to reconcile your award in multiples of 6 months. If you submit your claim form between 1 and 5 months late you should still only reconcile the 6 months following you last claim even though this may not reconcile your total project costs up to the date at which you submit your late claim. If you submit your claim form between 6 and 11 months late you will need to reconcile the 12 months following your last claim even though this may not reconcile your total project costs up to the date at which you submit your late claim. When your late claim has been processed and paid you should continue to submit claims as normal i.e. one claim at the start of each year of your project and one claim 6 months into your project year. You do NOT have to wait 6 months from when your late claim was paid before you submit your next claim. Where can I get further information? Hopefully this guide will have helped you to provide us with the necessary evidence of spend for your project. However, if you have any further questions or queries please call and ask to speak to someone in the Payments Team. We also have a number of examples of good reconciliation that we could send to you upon request.

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