All Cochrane Entities, Part B: Cash flow forecast

Please complete one of these forms for the entity base, and any satellites, sub-groups, or branches.

(Please see ‘Notes for completion’, to which row numbers refer.)

Notes for completion 

General points

This cash flow forecast gives you the opportunity to describe your financial planning over a five-year period (if, for later years in this period, your financial status is unknown, please write ‘unknown’ in the table). Having this information is likely to be of benefit to you for financial planning, fundraising, and for internal governance. It will help the Monitoring and Registration Committee (MaRC) and the Secretariat by providing an accurate picture of each entity’s financial stability, and helping to identify current and potential future problems. It will enable the Collaboration to report (in aggregated/anonymised form) an accurate picture of the Collaboration’s financial status.

Individual entity figures will remain confidential between the entity, MaRC, Secretariat and Steering Group, although aggregated/anonymised data will be used more widely in fundraising, publicity, and related material.

Both ‘income’ and ‘expenditure’ refer to funds allocated and used specifically for Cochrane activities. If it is difficult to divide your overall funding into ‘Cochrane’ and ‘other’ activities, please make a common-sense judgement – there is no need to make extensive investigations.

Specific points

1. For simplicity, use your usual currency (please state what this is).
2. The Collaboration works to a financial year that runs from 1 April to 31 March each year, and it would help us if you could also use the same period. However, if this proves difficult, please use your normal financial reporting period, and change the description of the financial year in Row 2 as appropriate.
3. The table enables you to record your actual or planned annual income and expenditure for years 2004-05 to 2008-09. Please list income by source rather than by function. If you have obtained funding for a specific purpose, list the name of the funder and not the purpose. For example, if you had obtained funding for translating articles from the Spanish Government, this would be listed under ‘Spanish Government’, not ‘Translation’.
4. Please detail any commercial funding (as defined by the Collaboration’s policy on commercial sponsorship) as a separate item.
5. Expenditure has been categorised by specific functions. Please use the categories listed, but add others if you need to.
6. For future cost of staffing use a sensible estimate, such as the average percentage increase over the last three years. Please note that this makes no assumption of actual pay increases, which will no doubt be different from those estimated. The figure is used solely so that you have an estimate of future costs that you can use for planning purposes.
7. ‘Institutional overhead’ is the amount paid by you to your ‘parent’ or ‘host’ institution, and it would be helpful if you could provide the percentage figure at ‘[nn]’. Please use an explanatory note in ‘Any other comments’ if you feel that this would be helpful.
8. This is the total income minus the total expenditure.

Finally, if you need help to complete this table, Nick Royle is very happy to discuss this with you (+44 (0)1865 310138, nroyle@cochrane.org).