What is the Capacity Support Fee?
From 1 April 2020, CCA will be charging all but the smallest clients a uniform Capacity Support Fee of $100 +GST per year. The fee is charged together with the first invoice for the year.
The fee covers any questions a community organisation may have throughout the year that are not directly related to their financial statements or audit/review. We are helping groups with a large range of issues: Xero or MYOB support, payroll, IRD issues, employment, governance and constitutional issues, and sometimes spending a lot of time on complex issues that the organisation cannot reasonably afford to pay for. This replaces our optional support subscription and means you can pester us with questions guilt-free.
What if we Don’t Need Support?
In that case it is more of a solidarity fee, but we will still charge it. You’ll be helping another community organisation, and help strengthen the capacity of the not-for-profit sector overall.
There are significant administrative savings in charging a flat fee compared to a pay-per-use model, which will help with keeping costs low overall.
What is the Reason for the Fee?
Having to make ends meet. The number of community organisations we help continues to grow by about 50 each year, and has more than doubled in the last five years (between 2014 and 2019). Third-party funding to cover our costs has also grown, but not proportionally, and this trend will continue. Furthermore, our adminstrative costs are growing disproportionately with size at this stage in our growth (there’s no ‘economies of scale’ in small service-based enterprises).
This means that we have the option of either capping the number of organisations we support, or squeezing a little bit more out of you in fees. Since even our unsubsidised rates are still well below market rates, we feel there is a bit of wiggle room still.