For many charities and other public benefit entities (PBEs), service performance reporting sits alongside financial statements as a key part of the annual reporting process.

Stakeholders increasingly want to understand something more:

What difference did the organisation actually make during the year?

This is where Service Performance Information (SPI) comes in.

Under PBE FRS 48 – Service Performance Reporting, issued by New Zealand’s External Reporting Board (XRB), organisations report not only their financial performance, but also what they delivered and what changed as a result.

In simple terms, SPI brings together:

• why the organisation exists and what it’s trying to achieve
  • what it actually did during the year
  • how those activities contributed to outcomes
  • enough context to help readers understand the bigger picture of their work

Unlike financial reporting, which focuses on dollars, SPI is about impact.

The XRB guidance outlines some useful characteristics of good SPI. It should be relevant, reliable, understandable, comparable, and based on information that can be supported.

In practice, one of the trickier parts is choosing performance measures that reflect outcomes rather than just activities. For example, reporting how many workshops were delivered is helpful, but understanding what changed as a result is often what matters most to stakeholders.

Getting that balance right takes a bit of judgement, and it’s something many organisations refine over time as their systems and data improve.

The External Reporting Board has published a series of helpful factsheets that step through the process. We’ve summarised the 10 steps below as a practical overview.

If you’re reviewing your approach, the XRB’s service performance reporting guidance and factsheets are well worth a look.

At BVO Audit, we work with charities and not-for-profits to develop clear, practical service performance reporting that reflects the work they do.