Aaaaahhh... the joys of the non-music side of running a music ensemble. Our group is set up as a incorporated non-profit which enjoys the benefits of a cultural charity (income and sales tax exemptions).. and along with those benefits, we have to have four committee meetings and an AGM each year... plus the annual financial and administrative reporting to the regulator at the end of each financial year.

It is a bit of a pain in the arse to prepare... but thankfully, we do a wrap and reconciliation of finances and administration after each concert which means that our numbers and documents are pretty close to being ready to submit.

All that needs to be done is to do the final reconciliation for the last bills in the year and then write up the annual report, submit and then close the year out. We might also just do a voluntary financial audit as well... we did one last year for a large grant application, and a retired accountant was able to do that for us for an affordable price. It is a small extra expense, but worthwhile to have the independent assurance that we are doing things properly.

The annual report is a bit annoying as the concert year lines up with the calender year, whilst the financial year is half-way through the year... so the finances end up being weirdly crossed with the concert scheduling. It is possible to change the reporting to the regulator to be by the calender year... and that is probably something that we will end up doing at some point to make things less weird, but for the moment... we can deal with weird.

We also use cash accounting instead of accrual as our ensemble has a relatively small turnover... but this can lead to some weird lumpiness as costs and income are recorded when they hit our accounts instead of when they are "used"... and this was really the case this year, as we had a small bunching of festivals, grants, and concerts in the last financial year which made it look like our revenue and expenses suddenly doubled for the year! Ah well... but it is still easier to do this cash accounting for small groups... especially when we are still working with Excel spreadsheets and not a paid accounting software (which costs too much for us to consider at the moment... we prefer to have more musicians instead).

.. and so, here we go, getting all this done in the next week or so. Should be pretty quick to wrap... and then we move to doing our own personal tax returns... not in such good easy reporting ship-shape-ness. Sigh...

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