Bingo and Charitable Gaming Editing and Proofreading Services

A service club runs a weekly bingo to fund a youth program. Its licence return reports gross receipts, prizes paid and a net figure donated to charitable purposes. The regulator's audit finds the hall rental was paid to a company owned by the club's own treasurer, that the rate was never compared to market, and that the return recorded it in a general expenses line with no breakdown. Nothing was stolen and everything was disclosed somewhere in the club's own minutes, but the licence is suspended for a season because the return itself never showed any of it.

We edit what bingo halls and charitable gaming organisations produce — licence applications and renewal returns, gaming event financial reports and reconciliation statements, rules of play and house rules posted for players, prize board and payout schedules, volunteer training and duty manuals, use-of-proceeds statements describing charitable purposes, supplier and hall rental agreements, raffle and lottery scheme submissions, and internal cash handling and control procedures. Our editors work on the return a regulator reads without ever visiting the hall.

The licence return is the whole of what a regulator knows about how an organisation ran its games, and its failure is a summary that reconciles arithmetically while leaving every question a regulator actually asks unanswered. We work through these so each expense category is broken out to the level the regulator's own form contemplates rather than aggregated into general expenses, since a total that balances tells an auditor nothing about what the money was spent on; so any payment to a person or company connected to the organisation is identified as a related-party payment with the relationship named, given that this is what an audit is looking for and disclosing it elsewhere in the minutes does not put it in front of the reader who matters; so the basis for a rate paid to a supplier is stated when the supplier is connected, because a reasonable rate that is never shown to be reasonable is indistinguishable on the page from one that is not; so the charitable purpose the net proceeds went to is named specifically with the amount, rather than described as community programs, since the purpose is the condition the licence was granted on; and so any figure that is estimated, apportioned or carried over between periods is labelled as such with its method, given that an apportionment presented as a measured figure is the discrepancy an auditor finds and then treats as a reason to look at everything else. Returns written this way answer the audit before it starts.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including financial records, licence materials and organisational information. We are editors rather than gaming regulators, auditors or licensing consultants, and we offer no view on licence conditions, financial reporting requirements or compliance. What we can do is make sure the return shows what an auditor will otherwise have to come and find.