Sometimes you have to stop putting something off, and get on and do it. Today it was raining, I'd busked my way through one beekeepers' committee meeting armed with nothing more than a bank statement, and had an email in my inbox from the new membership secretary asking me to confirm a quite long list of names of people who hadn't paid yet. It was time to start the accounts.
2014 will be the third time I've done them. Compared to the first year, when I happily entered all the data in spreadsheets of my own devising based on the previous year's accounts, and only looked at the guidance on the format required by the County Treasurer afterwards, I've got a far clearer idea of what totals and subtotals I want to drop out of the spreadsheet at the end of December. And to guard against data input errors, when something gets typed as five pounds on one sheet and seven on another, so that I spend hours going round in circles trying to work out why the totals don't match up and where the discrepancy has come from, I have pretty much arrived at a layout where each figure is input once and once only, and all totals including that figure are calculated by Excel, and copied where needed from one sheet to another. And I've learned never to leave odd figures unallocated, just because they are small, with the intention of coming back to them later. If I don't know how to classify a stray deposit or expense in February, it is going to make even less sense in eleven months' time, when I come to do the final accounts.
Allocating subscription income is not conceptually difficult, but fiddly, because compared to a stand-alone society where your subscription entitles you to membership for the year, end of story, the beekeepers are a Division of a County Association, which is in turn part of a National Association. Every subscription thus breaks down like Gaul into three parts, plus a standard fee for bee disease insurance which the Division passes on to a third party insurance provider. Members with more than three colonies of bees need to pay an additional insurance premium, then everyone has the option to donate to divisional funds, a county level educational fund, and bee research. My aim is to ensure that the sum of all these parts is exactly equal to the amount paid into the bank, and to get that right now, so that I am not left hunting the difference in early January 2015, with the AGM looming.
The membership secretary has a far more onerous job, because she has to chase the 2013 members who still haven't renewed, to discover whether they really want their membership to lapse, or have simply not got round to renewing it. Since insurance cover lapses along with the membership, giving up membership can have real world implications in a way that failing to renew your garden society or art club membership (until you see details of a meeting you want to attend and decide to join after all) doesn't. Which said, if it was up to me I'd issue a couple of clear warnings to past members, that if they don't contact us by a given date their membership will cease and they will not be insured, and leave them to it. No other organisation I have ever belonged to goes to as much trouble to follow up on non-renewing members as the beekeepers seem to. We are fairly sure that some of them delay renewing deliberately, until they see whether their bees have survived the winter.
Hunting through my inbox for messages that might help me clarify a couple of queries brought up by the new membership secretary led me by degrees to having a long session clearing that out as well. I'm reasonably good at chucking out Amazon order confirmations and shipping notifications, once the parcel has arrived, and not bad at junking monthly newsletters, but don't seem to have dared erase or bothered to file most of the messages received in 2013 concerning either the beekeepers or the music society. And there were a lot of them. Mostly with attachments, which is probably one reason why I was so slow to deal with them, since opening all the attachments would be a bore, but I didn't want to chuck anything I should have kept. However, nobody needs the agenda for six committee meetings back, or draft concert schedules that were superseded months ago, or even polite messages thanking them for meringues and nibbles, and I decided that since the 2013 beekeepers' accounts were now done and audited, I must have hard copies of all invoices on file, and didn't need to keep invoices or membership queries relating to the prior year in my inbox.
It took ages. There again, my desk is generally heaped with stuff waiting to be read, filed or thrown out, so there's no reason to think I'd be any tidier in the digital world. It was actually rather lucky I went through them, since I found confirmation of a woodland charity talk I'd agreed to do and not written in my 2014 diary. That was a shock, because despite the messy desk I have never double booked myself or missed a talk in ten years. Looking at the dates, I think it was confirmed just as the great storm of last year hit, so I may have had other things on my mind.
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