Have you noticed this difference between money and material commodities? If, say you take 10 gallons of petrol at £2.80 a gallon, the petrol delivered will be more or less 10 gallons within half a pint either way. But you have to pay exactly £28.00. £27.80, which is near enough, will not do. Money has to be exact.

It is within this constraint regarding the special nature of money that the DCA auditor has to work, presumably to make sure that every last penny is accounted for and in its place. But, as with the above petrol, one soon runs into the more-or-less factor. On the face of it, if N members each pay, say, £10 the subscription income should come to £I0N precisely. But there is always a ragged edge, e.g., from those who pay extra for being late and from foreign remittances that do not leave the exact £10 after being exchanged. Then instead of each financial year being an island unto itself, 1st April to 31st March, there are subs that come in before April 1st and some after. Also there are debts incurred before the end of the accounting year that will be paid shortly after. The Treasurer has had to decide whether to draw up a balance sheet in terms of monies handled within the year, or try to collect all the stray bits that belong to a particular year. To this extent, therefore, any balance sheet is a work of art — it presents one aspect of the state of affairs.

The DCA has been well served by conscientious and methodical treasurers. I have served as independent auditor for the most part of two decades during the treasurerships of John Clark, Gail McClellan and now Terry Hughes. Around midsummer I am presented with the relevant documents; the invoices and receipts for items of expenditure, lists of subs etc. received and the bank statements. John and Gail met with me at my home. In those days of steam bookkeeping, the accounts sheet had to be summed up each column, then the rows across the columns, and finally the sub-totals at the sides and bottoms separately summed to see if they came to the same end result. Sometimes a discrepancy emerged and the reason for it had to be located. It would natural be for a small sum like £1.25 or so, and trifling in relation to the value of the time taken to find where it had crept in; nor did it imply that any money was missing. Gail introduced a tidy-box called ‘reconciliation’ into which such awkwardnesses could be packed. Terry, now in Scotland brought bookkeeping into the computer age, and the arithmetic now needs much less checking. We communicate by post.

My care is to see a proper invoice and receipt for each items of expenditure. It is not for me to question the expenditure; that is for the Committee, but now and again if an item seems peculiar I ask for an explanation which the treasurer gets from the spending agent concerned. I check that all the sums received were paid into the bank account, and that the balances at year end are as stated in the accounts for the AGM. I also see if the subs income corresponds reasonably well with the number of members shown in the last directory issued in February each year. There is a ragged edge here too, in that the current list is probably a bit out of date, and we have the problem of the different amounts of each sub mentioned above. Sometimes there has seemed to be more subs than members, and sometimes the reverse.

Since last year, to minimise the ragged edge effects, the accounts are presented in a simplified but more definite form. i.e., they state only the receipts and outgoings that actually occurred April 1 to March 31 next, and the bank balances at the latter date. That much is definite and stands clear of any decisions as to what to include within the year, and what to leave out. It greatly facilitates the job. Then the treasurer adds such notes as are necessary to round out the picture with other relevant data. Late items missing from the main statement this year will appear in that for next year. This is a departure from the traditional form of presentation of accounts for businesses. But then the DCA is not a business run for profit, and we do not yet have to consider matters like depreciation of assets, wages, insurance’s and so forth. Apropos: the note on the DCA Web site in Bulletin 155 has made me wonder what the effect would be of a marked increase in membership. Some thought should be given to this, but I would guess that our present voluntary effort could cope with, say, double the present membership. Were it to go much beyond that, the work load might call for paid help.