Staying Solvent

[Mike Chambers]

The club's financial system is very primitive. We collect subs, pay more than half of what we collect to the BMC, act as a bank for various (self financing) trips and occasionally buy sandwiches, pay YHA subscriptions or buy some of the bits and pieces we cannot borrow.

 

Analysts will recognise immediately that:

 

• we get all our income during the first few weeks of the year - so we have to make the money last
• when an event isn't self financing that can be a major concern.

We try to maintain a balance of £1,000 in order to cover adavance payments for forthcoming events (last year we paid £800+ for the lundy trip before we started to collect contributions).

 

Last weekend at Coed-y-Brenin we stayed in a 30 bed bunk house that we had booked for our exclusive use at a cost of £600. We set a nominal contribution of £25 per person, guessing that 24 people were likely to attend (based on previous years). In the event 18 were. With the money collected in advance from those who were unable to come and the £450 from those present we were more than £100 short. In terms of the potential loss to the club this would have been the equivalent of 10 members' subsciptions or about 20% of our total annual income. People chipped in an extra £3.50 per night (making it an expensive stay - and some were not happy about the suggestion) and we managed to persuade the owner to accept a reduced sum so, in the end, we achieved break-even.

 

Part of the problem here was that we were late collecting cash from members who had said they wished to come. With more notice of the reduced turn-out there may have been more options open to us and we could have come up with an arrangement that would have been much fairer to everyone without the risk to club funds.

 

We must reinforce our policy of requiring pre-payment.

 

Any other ideas?

 

Mike

 

[Nigel Blandford]

Is it possible to add PayPal or something similar to the website so people can book and pay online for events?