RESERVES AND RESERVES POLICY

The Trustees of the charity have set the unrestricted reserves policy at a level so that there are sufficient funds to cover:

• three months of operations in the event of any unplanned closure and its impact on beneficiaries, Staff and other financial commitments;

• fluctuations in annual projected income; and

• foreseeable financial commitments.

The Trustees have set a range of £300,000 to £350,000 as an appropriate level of unrestricted reserves for the future plans of the charity.

The Trustees have designated £99,212 of general funds for the purchase and implementation of a cloud-based CRM system and upgraded website for membership, events, marketing, donations and reporting. This is net of £788 paid to a consultant in the financial year to support the scoping and tendering process. In June 2022, suppliers were confirmed. Chorus CRM will deliver EVO 365, a charity sector focused CRM built using the infrastructure of Microsoft Dynamics 365, whilst Digital Wonderlab will deliver the CMS and website using Umbraco. Both suppliers are recognised as ‘Gold standard’ and their Implementation/s began in July 2022. The new CRM system and website are essential for improving our beneficiaries ease of use while matching future digital demands for our services and resources. We expect to parallel-run the CRM in February and March 2023 with full transition in April 2023.

The Trustees have designated £32,040 to create a ‘Dance On Toolkit’ based on the Dance for Health Links event research sharing to reduce the number of older people who are not achieving 30 minutes of moderate physical activity per week. The fund will cover the staff time for each lead organisation to contribute to creating the tool kit and its subsequent design. One Dance UK will disseminate this with contributing partners in a resource and host this on our website.

At the year end, we hold £347,165 in unrestricted reserves (£317,888 at 31 March 2021). The designated reserves at 31 March 2021 amounted to £131,252 (£100,000 at 31 March 2021). This has been identified by the Trustees as an appropriate level.

At 31 March 2022, the Charity holds £2,071 at 31 March 2021 (£18,167 at 31 March 2021) in restricted funds for specific projects.