Difference between revisions of "Treasury"

Revision as of 17:00, 16 June 2006

Introduction

Treasury is a function within a convention that holds the convention's funds, and the processes that surround funds handling. As part of this role, the Treasurer has the primary role in making sure those funds are used responsibily. The Treasurer does this proactively by creating or helping to create a budget for the convention and operationally by disbursing and collecting funds.

This article describes an approach, along with tips and hints, for acting as a convention's Treasurer.

Approach

Plan for Success

Every convention has different goals and objectives. Just as with every organization, it is often the case that the convention has less money and other resources than it needs to achieve all of its aspirations. So, there must be choices made among the objectives so that the most important ones are achieved. Achieving those goals will then be a measure of the success of your convention. As Treasurer, you should then provide for resources to be available to achieve those goals through the process of creating a budget.

The method of choosing which goals and objectives should be met is beyond the scope of this article. Here are some possible considerations:

• The Goals of the Convention's Parent Organization: If your convention has a parent organization, it is likely that organization was founded to promote or advance some goal. For instance, the organization could have been formed to promote science fiction and fantasy art. It is likely that your convention should promote art, too.

• Desires and Expectations of your Customers (i.e. attending fans): Everyone wants to get the most out of their discretionary income. Why should they spend their hard earned cash at your con? Maybe you have great Hospitality. Maybe you have great Programming. These are the kinds of things that go into your value proposition to potential attendees. They are also the kinds of things you will want to make note of for Publicity

• Number of Attendees: Do you want to hold the largest convention ever, or would you be satisfied if around 50 people attended? The answers to these questions will determine how important such things as advertising is to you and the kind of space you will need to house your convention.

• Net Proceeds: Many conventions are set up as non-profits. Many, but not all. If you are a for-profit, you need to decide how much profit you want to make; you don't want to spend your profits. If you a non-profit (or a not-for-profit), you need to know how much money you want to end up with as well. Almost all conventions would like to occur at least annually, so you do not want to lose so much money that you will no longer be a going concern. You may also need to have more money than what you started with in order to cover other costs. For example, many conventions have a parent organization that has costs it needs to cover and the way that parent gets the funds it needs is through the convention. Lastly, while it is doubtless an option many would not choose, you may make a strategic choice to lose money. This would be thought of as investing in the future. You might, for example, sponsor a number of guests in order to get people to come to this year's convention in the hope that many of those same people will stay with you for future years.

As you see, Planning For Success is another way of saying that a vision for the convention must be established. Once that vision is set, you will be able to set your budget. While this should happen every time, this step is sadly overlooked many times. This leads to conventions repeating the forms of previous years but, in time, without capturing the spirit that gave those forms life. In the end, failure to plan is planning to fail.

Budgeting

With (hopefully) a firm grasp of the factors that you and your convention have decided will make your convention a success, you can begin the process of creating a budget.

You probably worked with the Executive Committee (or something very like it) in setting the vision. You will now need to work with the heads of the Departments. They possess (or should possess) the know-how to operate their respective functions. They should then be able to scope what they want to do so that it supports the convention's vision. Some of the things they will want to do will cost money. After gathering these requirements, you will have to prioritize them to decide how much money each area will receive.

As part of this decision, you will need to project how much money the convention will be receiving (from Registration and other income producing areas) and when this money will be received.

Some useful budgeting tools:

• Provisional budgets (typically covering marketing) allow the convention to begin operating while deferring main budget decisions until the budget requirements are better understood.
• Budgets amendments typically require the approval of a supervisory body and as such are useful not only for making changes to the budget but for providing an excuse for not doing so. They also provide a handy artificial deadline (the meeting date of the supervisory body) for flushing out problems with the budget as passed.
• Contingent budgets allow planning what to do with extra money (or for things to automatically cut in case of shortfall), which can help establish fiscal discipline as volunteers will not consider there to be a large surplus available to them.
• Discretionary spending (or "contingency") funds are a less focused way to concentrate and formalize the ability to spend extra money in a small number of hands while giving those people the flexibility to react to events without going back to the supervisory body.
• Unnamed line items differ from contingency funds in that the item can't be added to existing line items, and the item can be restricted to certain categories of unanticipated expense.
• Don't be afraid to look at budgets from prior years.

Pre-con Treasury

The easiest way to save a ton of time is to delegate some amount of treasury work to the departments, particularly to pre-registration. Give them a deposit stamp and some deposit slips and have them photocopy incoming checks and mail them in. Give them a credit card machine and have them process the incoming credit cards -- or put your credit card machine on the net and have them submit mailed-in credit card registrations there. The two keys here are communication and responsibility. You need to make sure you get copies of the checks. If registration is currently handling checks and passing them on to you, you can probably count on them to send you a photocopy instead. But if your con currently has someone else open mail and send checks directly to you without passing through registration, you may need to examine whether the reg people can be counted on to get you information promptly. Chances are you've really already done this in deciding not to have registration touch the checks in the first place. You also need to make sure checks aren't lost, cash doesn't get sent through the mail, deposit slips are filled out correctly, and deposits happen in a reasonable time-frame. Again, this is a trust issue with registration which is orthogonal to the question of whether to deputize the registration (or art show, or dealers room) staff.

At-con Treasury

It is important to minimize the number of people involved in the treasury department. We like to hope that our fellow staff are not going to steal from the convention, but large amounts of cash can unfortunately turn some people.

Tips on operations:

• Cash should regularly be emptied from Sales areas, two people should always go together to get (or to drop) cash.
• It is generally best to swap the entire cash drawer than to actually handle cash at sales areas.
• You should record what the Starting and Ending amounts on each drawer are, and who worked on each drawer, including everybody in the treasury department that came in contact with the drawer. If you do have a theft, logs will be required to collect from your insurance. Make sure you know the amount that your insurance policy covers as a maximum for cash on site and do your best not to exceed that amount by making regular drops to the bank or the hotel safes.

Helpful items:

It is in the best interest of most conventions over say 500 people to take credit cards. It is a convenience item, it reduces the cost of insuring cash, and reduces the chance of theft. It also reduces the amount of money you need to count.

A bill counter usually only costs $100~200 depending on speed and quality. If you have ever counted over $25,000 in cash by hand you will be thankful for this investment.

Auditing

In order to detect malfeasance, your paper trail must have redundancy. With online account access this is less difficult than it used to be, but it should still be taken into account when designing processes. Being able to reconstruct the cash flow using only records from non-Treasury staff (ie, department records of cash collected) is particularly important. No process should be entirely reliant on a single person (or computer) maintaining a single accurate record. This protects both the convention and the individuals involved in cash handling. It might seem like extra paperwork, but it helps greatly to isolate and identify errors that creep into the system.