The first part of this article, describing the financial reporting system, the Children's Welfare Association of Victoria has developed for Victorian Child Welfare Agencies, explained the motivation in setting the system up, the objectives and achievements of the system, and gave some broad information about funding proposals that have stemmed from the analysis of financial data through the system.
To many accountants the idea that welfare agencies would require computerised accounting may seem incongruous. However, Children's Welfare Association of Victoria have found, as a welfare field response to the standardised financial reporting system that they developed during 1981/82, that the need for such a system is clearly established. This mainly resulted from the focus of the reporting system on functional accounting which had not been addressed fully by many welfare agencies prior to the implementation of this system. In 1982 the Victorian State Government expressed a clear commitment to programme budgetting for all Government departments and as the voluntary child welfare field is heavily reliant on Government funding, it is expected that all agencies will need to respond to this commitment as if they were Government organisations. Programme budgetting needs as its base, a clear functional classification of income and expense. Therefore, the need for this form of accounting has become more obvious over the last twelve months.
It has been known for years in the residential child care field voluntary agencies are severely handicapped by the fact that the way one agency records its income and expenditure is quite different from the next agency. The most immediate effect is that since little sense can be made of what it really costs to keep a child in care, it is virtually impossible to organize a case as to how current government subsidies should be varied which will convince ourselves, much less the Victorian State Treasury.In 1974 – 75, notwithstanding this limitation, the Children's Welfare Association of Victoria (C.W.A.V.), through its "Survival Committee", was able to negotiate substantial and largely positive changes to the then subsidy system, although limitations in what was developed were obvious before the new scheme was implemented. It must be recognized, however, that the "Survival Committee" belongs to another era. Here are just a few reasons why:
