The Treasurer

The Treasurer provides strategic oversight of Aprender’s financial health, sustainability, and integrity. As Aprender grows its programmes, partnerships, and digital reach, the Treasurer ensures that financial planning, controls, and reporting support the organisation’s mission while maintaining strong accountability to funders, regulators, and beneficiaries.

Aprender is a small but ambitious charity operating with a lean structure and increasing complexity as it scales. In this context, the Treasurer plays a critical governance role in helping the Board understand financial risks and opportunities, ensuring robust stewardship of resources, and supporting long-term financial resilience.

Working closely with the Chair, CEO, and fellow trustees, the Treasurer ensures that Aprender’s finances enable — rather than constrain — sustainable growth and impact.

The current acting treasurer has acted as management accountant, given that the current financial arrangements for the charity are simple. An external accounting firm is retained to prepare statutory accounts. As the new strategy takes hold and fundraising efforts begin to yield, the new treasurer is expected to focus on strategic finance, and the acting treasurer will remain as management accountant until the new treasurer appoints a financial assistant. This role description therefore temporarily covers some operational financial matters as well as strategic finance.

A separate function exists to undertake fundraising, with another trustee taking the lead on this important discipline. The Treasurer will work closely with this function but will not have management responsibility for it.

Responsibilities

• Provide strategic oversight of Aprender’s financial sustainability, resilience, and long-term planning
• Support the Board in understanding financial performance through review and interpretation of management accounts, budgets, and forecasts
• Lead the preparation of the annual budget in conjunction with the CEO, present it to the Board for approval, and monitor performance against budget across the year
• Recommend a Reserves Policy to the Board and review it at least annually, ensuring its rationale is properly disclosed in the Trustees’ Annual Report
• Ensure appropriate financial controls, policies, and delegated authorities are in place and subject to regular review
• Act as a bank signatory and ensure the charity maintains an appropriate bank mandate, with dual-authorisation arrangements for payments above Board-agreed thresholds
• Help the Board identify, manage, and properly record conflicts of interest and related-party transactions affecting the charity’s finances
• Oversee the charity’s approach to reserves, financial risk management, and resource allocation
• Ensure restricted and unrestricted funds are correctly accounted for and that restricted funds are applied only for their designated purposes
• Provide governance-level oversight of compliance with financial reporting requirements set by the Charity Commission, Companies House, and HMRC (including Gift Aid and, as applicable, VAT and PAYE)
• Support the Board in understanding the financial implications of strategic decisions and growth plans
• Monitor the charity’s income and asset levels against statutory audit and independent examination thresholds, and advise the Board in good time of any change in external scrutiny requirements
• Advise the Board on the financial implications of VAT registration and of becoming an employer (including PAYE, pension auto-enrolment, and employer National Insurance) as the charity grows
• Ensure that appropriate financial expertise (staff, volunteers, or external professionals) is in place to deliver day-to-day financial administration
• Liaise at governance level with independent examiners, auditors, or professional advisers where required, and recommend their appointment to the Board
• Provide constructive challenge to ensure strong financial stewardship and value for money
• Chair the Finance, Risk and Audit sub-committee of the Board (with the Treasurer’s risk remit being financial risk; enterprise-wide risk is owned at full Board level), and be a full Board member