Honorary Treasurer's report

Alison Whybrow

Thinking about the role of the treasurer on a Society committee, you would be forgiven for assuming this is about signing a few cheques and making sure that the end of year accounts balance to some fashion before you send them off to the Accounts Office within the BPS.

I was under a similar illusion myself when it was suggested that I take up this role.

However, the Special Group is run pretty much like a business, and the role of treasurer is key. One of our main goals is to ensure that any subscriptions that we raise from our members are kept to a minimum. Rather than taking member subscriptions for granted, we want a range of revenue generating strategies in place that ensure we are able to reduce our reliance on our members’ pockets. We started with a bank balance of a couple of thousand to finance a very busy and packed agenda over the next 12 to 24 months.

A financial strategy and some thoughtful budget planning is clearly required, planning a budget for the future when you have no ‘past’ to base it on and very limited financial experience is a bit of a challenge.

So far our costs are very low - this is in part due to the BPS office providing us with their substantial support for free over the first 12 months of our existence. Similarly, committee members have spent an awful lot of their time and energy to deliver the actions outlined in our strategic plan. Some of this will in time need to be outsourced as volunteers cannot be expected to continue to take on this work in the longer term. All this will increase the costs that we need to cover as we develop over the next few years.

Our one clear opportunity to raise some funds to deliver our strategic aims and meet member’s interests is through our events programme. So far, we’ve managed to balance the need to raise funds and the need to make our events as accessible as possible to members and non-members alike. The events that we’ve run to date have been a marked success as reports in other parts of this newsletter will confirm.

If this continues to be the case, we can be optimistic about keeping member fees to a minimum - Stephen Palmer and I are currently working on the budget and it seems that a membership fee of £3.50 per annum may be the final figure for 2006 - no more than a glass of wine! We hope to maintain the lowest subs for any BPS subsystem in the foreseeable future based on good financial budgeting.

Contact
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