2018-11-04 Finance Committee
Present: AB (Treasurer), EM (VP), LM, SOO, SM, JZ
Absent: P? (but she hasn’t been added to the group yet), LH
Apologies: RM, AK (President)
Setting: After many changes, we have settled for the House 8 Study room as DST are in the Conference room at the moment
Agenda:
1. Sports and Socs Invoice Tracking
2. Internal reclaim form
3. Budgets
4. Xero and future accounting
5. Financial Procedures Standing orders/Trustees
6. AOB
Introductions from AB where he apologises for being a bit disorganised. Reminds everyone that the minutes from meetings will go up online to remind everyone what they need to do. What he wants to do this meeting is to run through what there is to do this year.
1) Sports and Socs Invoice Tracking
One the problems from last year was that lots of Sports use the pitches at MC and think its going to be involved to the JCR but actually we get a lump invoice from MC and we don’t know how much is for which teams. AB has made a team drive to put everyone on and on this, he wants the treasurers and presidents to use this to keep track of things that get invoiced to the JCR. We need to make sure the presidents and the treasurers don’t forget what they have used.
Fi Comm are needed to make sure they
AB asked if it’s best to allocate members of FI Comm specific sports to keep track of. Everyone thinks this is a good idea.
AM is Football and netball (his girlfriend is the treasurer of that)
SOO is Men’s Rugby,
LM is Badminton, Hockey
JZ is Women’s Football, Women’s Rugby
JZ asks where frisbee train- behind Fonteyn
ACTION POINT: AB is going to put a post up with all of his. If these sports (who use MC) haven’t updated the spreadsheet in over a week then send them an email to prompt them. If they don’t respond talk to AB
2) Internal Reclaim Form
There haven’t been many at the moment, but the way the JCR pays for most things (other than big payments) is through reclaim forms. What AB wants to do for this is to make a googledoc that only fi comm can access. He will then forward reclaims to fi comm and they will extract all the information from those reclaims onto this spreadsheet based on simple headings like budget headings and subheadings, account number and names etc so that it’s really easy for AB to process them.
AB then shows everyone his nice spreadsheets about how sports and socs work so that everyone has a better idea of what he means by budget headings and things. We still don’t have some things from AK because her laptop is broken, but
ACTION POINT: AB will circulate the budget, the power point from last years budget meeting, and also the google doc he is going to make for this.
AB explains what is valid evidence
3) Budgets
One of our main functions is that if people want to amend their budget or there is a new society, we need to decide whether this budget is finable. We have a few procedures for approving budges. We consider whether it fits in with our overall expenditure. We aim to break even each year. The second this is that people often ask for too much- up to £40, we will match what a sport or soc pays in subs, once you go past £40 it becomes 75:25 – this is mostly for the boat club so that their subs are reasonable.
Another point is the Fashion Show Budget. Because they spend a lot- about £4,000 ish, so there are some things they need to pay for before ticket sales come out. What they keep doing is asking for a grant; we wouldn’t get this back. By giving them this grant that goes into their profits so that goes to the charity. We as a charity does not give to other charities as it doesn’t fall in line with our charitable aims. Last year they didn’t get a grant. The argument for, is that they could spend more on the show that they wouldn’t otherwise spend.
SOO, doesn’t know
SM says they could easily find extra 300 pounds to make it better
LM Inclined not to give it
SM, could they use it to have a really good prize or something
AB says we have discussed it as an exec. Fashion show raise about £8,000 in profits so £300 won’t go far in making things better
JZ is it possible to keep 2%-5% of their profit so they can have some reserves to make the shows better in later years. This point is still anti grant
AB does note that the Fashion Show doesn’t fit in anywhere because it’s not run by the Social Chair of the JCR – which is why we don’t give money for to it. For example, we don’t spend money on Michaelmas, but we do invest about £9k in summer ball and £3.5k in Cuth’s day.
EM notes that it’s not in the standing orders as a committee but AB notes that they are still elected positions
ACTION POINT: Think about your views on what the fashion show is/ should be – all
SM says “it’s a good night out”
Throughout the year we will have more of these sort of things to discuss
There will be a big meeting before the budget meeting at the end of the year and we will need to blitz all the budgets for that post exams
4) Financial Procedures Standing orders/Trustees
There are a lot of things going on with the trustees at the moment. [AB explains what the Trustees are]. At the moment we are doing some finance related things, but hopefully we will be writing some standing orders about how we deal with budgets. [EM asks AB to explain what the SOs are]. There is meant to be a document to help us with the big budget at the moment, but it’s not in the standing orders. We are all going to work on this together because we need it.
I.e. we need to have the rule about the 40% subs that is written down somewhere official
AB is going to give out sub sections of that.
We need to put in a lot of financial procedures as we are a new independent charity – 7 years old. We need things at a higher level than the Standing Orders and we need those because we’ve been having issues with the audit. One of the trustees made a target operating model which we are trying to work towards. There are some different proposals. The exec are keen to have an assistant treasurer who will sit a level below AB. They would be someone who could approve payments. But yeah, there is a lot of legal stuff that needs doing, so AB wants to get everyone involved with that if he can.
If we do get an assistant treasurer, there will be 10 of us so it should all be doable
5. AOB
• SOO asks how often meetings will be? AB says about 3 a term.
• AB notes that everyone here is now expected to come to JCR meetings and if you can’t then email EM about them
• EM asks for a cake rota is going to be a thing – because, based on reading all the old minutes, that seems to be a finance comm thing.
ACTION POINT: EM is the first on the rota for cake.