By JOYANNA LOVE/ Senior Staff Writer

The Chilton County Humane Society has received its completed audit for the 2015-2016 fiscal year.

Janice hull of Hull & Russell presented comments and recommendations on the audit during the Dec. 12 meeting of the board.

“You did have a clean audit opinion,” Hull said.

Since this was the first audit for the organization, Hull said she “set the materiality low,” meaning she checked a sample of invoices instead of all the invoices for the entire year.

“We had to do some additional testing, but you still got within all the confines of a clean audit,” Hull said.

While there were no major deficiencies in internal controls in handling the money, Hyche did recommend that there be two people counting the money at the end of fundraisers. She said records on specific auction items also need to be kept.

The audit was for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2016. At that time, the Humane Society had $7,004 in the bank and expected $1,500 to come in from Clanton, Jemison and Thorsby.

Total net assets were $53,683.

Total Revenue was $205,970. Contributions accounted for $82,144 of this. The remaining amount came from service contracts ($63,000), adoptions and fees ($46,221), fundraising ($13,256) and other income ($1,349).

“The thing that is concerning about this is you took in a total of right at $206,000 and just your program expenses —your allocated costs for payroll, utilities that we allocate toward actually running the shelter and all of those other expenses — was $206,000,” Hull said. “So you had very little to work with after that.”

The two largest expense lines were allocation of joint costs ($116,089) and veterinarian services ($68,688).

Once management and fundraising expenses were added the total functioning expenses came to $243,381.

The shelter had started the fiscal year with net assets of $91,094 and ended the 2016 fiscal year with net assets of $53,683.

Hull noted that salaries for running the shelter and utility costs have decreased since 2015.

Better record keeping was a recommendation by Hull. The board has implemented a new system that allows keeping track of donations more organized and electronic using Square pay system and an iPad. It also makes the records easily searchable.

Hull said invoices also need to be sent to the treasurer as soon as possible after they are received.

Hull also encourage the board to review the budget for the shelter on a quarterly basis.

“Sometimes they need to be amended,” Hull said.

She said this would be the case if the organization found out it would be receiving less or more revenue than had been initially budgeted.

Noncash contributions also need to recorded, according to Hull.

Humane Society Vice President Kristi Hyche said a binder was being set up to record this in.

In light of present financial difficulties, Hull gave the organization a discounted rate for her fee or completing the audit.

Board members have begun to research grants they could apply for now that the audit is complete. Board member Amy Nicholas said many of the grants she has seen will begin accepting applications in January.