Six months into my first year as Treasurer and finally all the handover activities have finished. Anybody who has been involved in running a club will know how painful it is to get the Banks to transfer authorities. The Association has been busy this year and there have been a lot of finance decisions and actions to complete. Luckily, I have some help with both the technical and strategic activity – Thank You to those people.
Everything done in the Association is done by teamwork and Council are the decision makers for all significant spend. This year we have been authorised to use some of our capital reserves to support matches and club development.
The Match Grants approved by the previous Council have been extremely well received by our clubs. As a club you can apply for support for one match per year as follows: £2,500 for a L3, £1,000 for a L2 and £500 for a L1, subject to certain conditions as outlined in the Grants policy within the Byelaws, section 5. There is a pot of £25,000 put aside for these match grants. Applications are through the website online form. Council have approved match grants of £9,500 so far, with more requests due to be submitted at our July meeting.
A few clubs have requested development grants, to date Council has approved £6,377.00 to Derwent Valley. There are 2 more applications currently going through the scrutiny process.
After a few fallow years of activity for NROI, they are holding several RO seminars and these are being financed by the Association. The current NROI budget for 2024 is £10,000, but we will need to increase that to meet the backlog of demand for new RO’s/ CRO’s/ Range Masters.
We also have our Association running costs; some of the significant costs can be seen below
- IT £6,000 p.a.
- Insurance £45,000 p.a.
- RO match payments £5,000 p.a.
Our main income stream is membership payments, which so far this year total just over £93,000. New members are joining everyday and we anticipate full year income to be in the region of £98,000.
If we continue with the same spend profile through 2024/25, we are likely to exceed our income. As Treasurer, I am accountable for the financial stability of the Association. This needs to be balanced with ensuring that the members get good value for their membership payment. Hopefully you feel we are getting the balance right this year.
In advance of the AGM this weekend, you can find the 2022/23 accounts here and the Agenda for the EGM here.
Finally, if you are looking for a Bank that is accepting of shooting clubs, Virgin Money have opened accounts for a couple of our affiliated clubs recently.
DVC Gareth