it's accounts time

After breakfast I thought that it was time to tackle the beekeepers' accounts.  I tried hard through last year to stick all receipts and invoices into a file as I went along, and enter them properly on a spreadsheet, so that in theory all I'd have to do in January was update the last few entries when the December bank statement arrived, and then the totals for every category of income and expenditure should drop out neatly at the bottom of each column.  If only.  Last year the process took at least two days, and the atmosphere in the kitchen as I sat at the table grappling with Excel and searching for lost paying-in slips was so fraught that the Systems Administrator was afraid to enter.

Mind you, last year was the first year I did them, and I'd made the error of recording all the information based on the format used by the previous Treasurer, and not the one I found needed to use to present the Divisional accounts to the County, when I looked in the Treasurer's handbook. Second time around I hoped it would all be slicker.  Although if I were County Treasurer I'd be looking to issue all divisions with a non-modifiable template into which they had to slot their own results, so that they could be amalgamated automatically.

My own make-it-up-as-you-go-along spreadsheets are only too easily modifiable, and there's the risk of forgetting mid way through the year how I intended information to flow through them at the start of the process.  The accounts of a little, local society tend to be small, but messy, so that a single payment of £19.60 can cover the cost of some stamps, a pint of milk, and printing menus for the annual dinner, which all fall into different expense categories, and a deposit of £260 could be mostly takings from a local show, but include one stray subscription.  My ideal was that I would break each transaction down into its constituent parts as I entered them on the spreadsheet, then use the accounting powers of Excel to derive all totals.  That way, the final grand totals for everything ought to correspond perfectly with the subtotals and the cash flow for each month, without my managing to type two different versions of the same number on to different schedules.

It almost worked.  Divisional subscriptions were the hardest to keep track of, since members make a single payment at the start of the year which covers their national subscription, county subscription, divisional subscription, a basic level of bee disease insurance, and may also include a donation towards research, a donation towards education, a divisional donation, and supplementary insurance.  There are both single and dual members, who do not pay exactly twice the county or national rate of a single member, plus Friends who do not pay a national subscription or get insurance.  The membership forms include details of every sub category except for the split between division, county, national and basic insurance.  The County Treasurer sends invoice for county and national subs in spring and autumn, and I did check his calculations at the time, likewise worked out the basic BDI when I sent off the cheques for disease insurance.  I ended up deriving divisional income as the amount left over when I'd totted up total subs, and taken national and county ones and the bee disease insurance off, which felt back to front when divisional income is likely to be the category of subscription income the divisional members are most interested in at the AGM.

Subscription errors did not help, an erroneous overpayment in 2013, and a bouncing cheque, and I spent a while fiddling about with a balancing item of £41.50.  When I described the problem to the SA, the SA said Aha, a failed trade, and recounted how in the City days, trades that didn't settle would be reversed out of the day's payments and receipts, to be settled a day or three later, only with no narrative description of what they were, and sometimes for good measure the broker would amalgamate five or six together.  Then it was a matter of looking through the list of all failed trades with that broker, and seeing if you could find any combination of numbers which added up to the required total.  Compared to that, ten pounds plus thirty-one pounds fifty didn't sound too bad.

I think I have now got an internally consistent income and expenditure account and balance sheet.  I think.  Before emailing the spreadsheets to my independent reviewer and asking if I can take the file over this weekend for her to have a look, I'd better sleep on it, and have one check in the morning, in case I have gone quite mad, or there are inconsistencies that I've missed.