I have sent the beekeepers' divisional Gift Aid declaration off to the County Treasurer. Compiling it is a tedious and moderately time consuming exercise, because HMRC require the address including postcode of every member who ticked the box saying they'd like the association to reclaim Gift Aid. This means I have to go through the folder of membership application forms and type the addresses into the spread sheet I'm going to send to the County Treasurer. I cannot believe that anybody at HMRC will ever check and verify any of them, and if they do that's not how they ought to be spending their time, since the answer to the UK's uncollected £35 billion of tax is not to be found in the Essex Beekeepers' Gift Aid declaration.
I'm not entirely sure which elements of subscriptions are eligible. Payments for bee disease insurance can't be, since that's a premium charged for the provision of an insurance service, namely compensation should your hives and bees be destroyed by a government inspector to combat disease. The beekeeping association doesn't retain any of the premiums, but pays the whole amount collected over to the insurance company. But what about extra payments made to cover the cost of posting out the monthly county magazine? In 2015 the division gave the members the choice of paying for the magazine to be posted to them, collecting it at meetings, or foregoing the hard copy entirely and reading it online. Quite a few people decided it was worth five pounds a year to have it posted to their home address, which doesn't quite cover the annual cost of postage. Is that eligible for Gift Aid?
Since I am stepping down as Treasurer at the end of the year I decided there was no point in spending any time trying to find out, and simply sent the County Treasurer a spreadsheet of Gift Aided subscriptions broken down into their component parts, leaving him to decide which categories he wanted to include. A tip to all volunteer Treasurers: find out the format in which you need to present the accounts at the start of the year. I didn't in my first year, and discovered at the year end that my accounts contained all the right numbers, but not necessarily in the right order. By now I know better, and when each subscription was banked I broke it down at the time into the various elements of the membership and donations for specified purposes, so that at the end of the year I'd only have to total the columns to know how much we'd received for honeybee research, education, or whatever it might be.
To replace the void in my life left by not being Treasurer any more I have agreed to be responsible for updating the music society's website. It should be interesting, and not nearly as time consuming as the Treasurer's role was. Most of the content will be written by other people, and most of it won't change that often. We are in the process of shifting to a new website, the old one having become obsolete to the point that it was no longer compatible with the hosting platform, while the man who wrote it for us had emigrated. I would have very little idea how to commission a website, but the Chairman has done it before, and organised all that. The new website is so clever it will automatically switch concert details from forthcoming concerts to past events as the date passes. The Systems Administrator has agreed to stand by ready to help out if I get stuck, since I am not particularly good with technology. I think that was one reason why I got the job, along with the fact that nobody else volunteered.
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