Sources and applications of funds

The main sources of funds include grants and donations, fund raising programmes, advertisements, fees from the members, technical assistance fees / fee for services rendered, subscriptions, gifts, sale of produce or publications, etc. Donations and grants received in the nature of promoter’s contribution are in the nature of capital receipts and shown as liabilities in the Balance Sheet of NGO. These may either be in the form of corpus contribution or a contribution towards revolving fund. A contribution made towards the capital or the corpus of an NGO is known as corpus contribution. The donors are generally required to specify whether the donation/grant given by him shall form part of the corpus of the NGO. Such contributions are generally given with reference to the total funds required by an NGO. Section 11(1)(d) of the Income Tax Act 1961 also states that income in the form of voluntary contributions made with a specific direction that they shall form part of the corpus of the trust or institution shall not be included in the computation to total income. The objective of a contribution or grant towards a Revolving Fund is to rotate the amount by giving temporary loans from the fund to other NGO or beneficiaries for their projects and then recover the loan so as to give temporary loans again and so on. However, any interest earned from the beneficiary on such temporary loans from the revolving fund could be either added back to the fund or credited to the Income and Expenditure Account depending on restrictions
laid down by the authority providing the contribution (for the revolving fund) or by the rules and regulations laid down by the concerned NGO in this regard. Donations and grants received for acquisition of specific fixed assets are those grants whose primary condition is that an NGO accepting them should purchase, construct or otherwise acquire the assets for which the grant is given. Many a times NGOs receive contributions in kind. These contributions include assets such as land, buildings, vehicles, office equipment, etc. and articles related to programmes / projects such as food, books, building materials, clothes, beds, and raw material for training purposes, e.g., Wool, reeds, cloth, etc. The areas of application of funds for an NGO include Establishment Costs, Office and Administrative Expenses, Maintenance Expenses, Programme / Project Expenses, Charity, Donations and Contributions given, etc.