Meet the client
Sefton Women’s and Children’s Aid (SWACA) provides free, practical and emotional support to women, children and young people affected by domestic abuse, regardless of age, race, disability, religion or sexuality.
The charity’s services include one-to-one support, group programmes, advocacy, therapy, refuge accommodation, and legal & financial advice. Since its foundation in 1974, SWACA has grown to support over 1,500 families each year, helping them to cope with, recover from and move beyond domestic abuse.
The challenge
As with many domestic abuse charities, SWACA faces rising cost pressures — staffing, premises etc. — while securing fundraising in a more competitive environment. Dependence on grants, council contracts, and variable fundraising income makes budgeting hard, especially for core / day-to-day costs.
When external grant funding is earmarked for specific projects rather than general overheads, it can leave gaps in covering essential running expenses. The organisation has also needed to scale up services, such as opening a new refuge, with funding that is time-limited, which introduces risk about sustaining those services once the contract ends..
How Adding Value helped
From the start of our journey with SWACA it was about improving the transparency of the numbers and getting a handle on the margin / contribution to core costs by project and fund. We supported this by creating a set of monthly management accounts that enabled the organisation to differentiate between core and project income and expenditure, ensuring that restricted grants are costed accurately and not subsidised by core funding.
This has enabled SWACA to improve its financial sustainability and grow reserves. In designing and reviewing reports at a project level on a monthly basis, the executive team were able to take a proactive approach in allocating resources effectively, ensuring project budgets were not overspent. We worked closely with SWACA to build annual budgets and to regularly review actual performance against plan.
A key element has been the educational support around finance, allowing the CEO to delegate with confidence some budget control responsibilities to the management team, knowing that they had our support throughout the process.
It’s been a rewarding journey seeing a client grow their revenues in excess of £1m and supporting them in improving their reserves to a much healthier and secure position. The growth journey also saw SWACA exceed the threshold for audit, so we were on hand to support them through this process too.
SWACA have worked with Adding Value since 2022 and received very high quality, efficient and effective support over the past 3 years. The staff are very friendly, responsive, knowledgeable/skilled, thorough and well-informed, and have collectively significantly strengthened SWACA’s financial management and business approaches, proving very good value for money. I would highly recommend Adding Value.
Neil Frackelton, CEO of SWACA
