Posted on behalf of James:
Treasurer’s Report
Frankly, it hasn’t been a great year for the Society financially. We haven’t had any ‘big earners’, so our events made a reasonable, though not large, overall gross profit. The other costs of the Society however vastly outweighed that, and the Society as a whole made a loss of over $4,000 this year. On the positive side, due to the event’s change in date, this year doesn’t include a Chimera, which typically earns more money for the Society. Furthermore, at least one upcoming event is looking like it will bring in a tidy profit for the Society. We can always use more events running however (especially in Auckland, which has a large rent bill to cover), especially if those events are well-attended (hint hint). Also, the Regional Treasurers are now all set up so that they are able to manage the bank account for their region, without having to rely on me. We also created a new bank account for the South Island and put $300 seed money in it. This account is currently being overseen by the Wellington Committee, and hopefully will provide a useful facility to our South Island reps and others who want to grow LARP there.
Unfortunately there seem to have been a few instances this year of people being somewhat lax in their treatment of NZLARPS’ funds. These include failing to deposit cash in a timely manner, failing to ensure that participants/attendees actually pay their game fee at all, and also seemingly possibly ignoring the concept of game budgets altogether. We allow quite a lot of leeway and autonomy (a lot more than you will find with most other not-for-profit organisations), in the interests of making it as easy as possible for people to run events, but we still expect that people will make a reasonable effort to appropriately manage the finances. What little funds NZLARPS does have at its disposal are entirely the result of the extremely hard work of a lot of people over the years who have made the fruits of their labour available to others, and it would be highly disrespectful to those people not to approach the finances with the same level of care that they did.
Think of it this way: If you borrowed a couple of thousand dollars from some of your friends, surely you would make sure that you managed that money well, so that you can pay your friends back properly. It is exactly the same principle here - NZLARPS’ money belongs to our members. So when we give someone $1,000+ to book a venue say, the members of the Society can expect that all reasonable steps will be taken to ensure that an event is a success both as a game, and as a financial activity. If you find yourself trying to manage the finances and struggling, please don’t hesitate to contact someone from your local Committee. They’re there to help, and they want to help.
