For non-profits

Why the records matter

An NPO has to be able to show what it did and that it was properly run. Attendance registers and meeting records are the everyday evidence: the activities happened, the committee met, and the people who took a decision were in the room.

Most choirs have these records somewhere. They are in a book at the door, a photograph of a signed page or somebody's memory, which is no help on the day a report is due or a funder asks a question.

With AtChoir the record is made as people walk in. Each scan is dated and saved with the event and the member, any event's register can be opened later, and the console totals attendance between any two dates.

Committee and management meetings

A committee meeting is taken the same way as a rehearsal. Add it to the calendar as a meeting and let people scan in. Because meetings are their own kind of event, a year of them can be read separately from the rehearsals.

For someone without a phone, or a member who said beforehand that they could not come, management marks them present, late, absent or excused by hand. Members can also send an apology in the app, and it is kept with the event. The record therefore shows who apologised and who was excused, as well as who scanned.

Rehearsals, concerts, committee meetings and the annual general meeting end up in one continuous record.

Annual reporting: what exists and what is planned

Today the console gives you attendance statistics. Between any two dates it shows attendance for each member, each voice group, each kind of event and each event, and it downloads as an Excel file. Events with no register are left out, and an event a member was excused from comes off their total.

We also plan to help NPOs put together the attendance and activity figures for their annual report to the Department of Social Development, from the records the choir already has. That is not built, so please don't count on it yet.

Even when it is built, two things will stay with you. AtChoir holds no financial records, so the financial statements stay with your treasurer and your accountant. And the report stays yours: what you submit, when you submit it and whether the Department accepts it are the organisation's responsibility. What AtChoir can do is keep the underlying records in one place.

Your members' information

Under POPIA, the choir is the responsible party for its members' personal information. SJL Consulting is what POPIA calls the choir's operator: we handle that information on the choir's instructions and for nothing else.

SJL Consulting is the responsible party only for its own billing records and its own technical logs, which hold no names, email addresses or message content.

The app holds a display name, an email address, an optional voice part, a role, the choir's attendance and to-do records, replies to events that ask for one, and the personal details a member chooses to add. It stores no age, and it has no field marking anyone as a child.

Where a choir has members under 18, the choir's management confirms once, for the whole choir, that it has the permission of their parents or guardians. Children are not asked to consent one by one in the app.

Production data is stored under EU jurisdiction. The database has no African region, so the EU was chosen, and that choice is locked when the database is created. Section 72 of POPIA permits a transfer abroad where the protection is substantially similar to its own.

The full detail, including how sign-in is protected, is in the privacy notice.

Talk to us

If your choir is a registered NPO and you would like to see whether AtChoir fits, write to info@sjl-consulting.co.za. Give us the choir's name, your NPO number if it is to hand, and roughly how many members you have.

AtChoir is a product of SJL Consulting (Pty) Ltd, registration 2019/210092/07, 14 Leonor, Dundas Street, Strand, 7140.