Cashflow forecast model

To understand our current financial situation, we need to know what kind of income we need in 10 years’ time. The Executive thought that a good place to start would be putting the Central Council’s own house in order and taking a hard look at how we spend ringer’s money.   To that end we built a mult-year forecasting model, which we will continue to use to help manage our financial health. In that process, we have categorised our spending into ‘operational’ (stuff we have to do to keep the lights on), and ‘project’ (stuff we ought to do to meet our charitable obligations).  In brief, these are to advance the practice, heritage and appreciation of bell ringing as an enjoyable mental and physical exercise and unique performing art for the public benefit of both church and community.  We then looked at our various sources of income, and how that was likely to change over the next ten years.

What does this tell us?

• With current sources and levels of regular income, simply keeping the lights on will put the Council in a small deficit for 2024.
• To achieve the goals of Ringing 2030 means that the Council will run out of money by some point in 2028.
• If we do nothing other than keeping the lights on, we will still run out of money, but it will take longer.

A snapshot forecast

We use to model to play with different incomes and expenditures, but here we have provided a snapshot of a forecast assuming that we increase the affiliation fee to £1 per member of an affiliated society. This gives us a balanced budget by 2030, with wiggle room for some ongoing projects and a paid member of staff. There are some assumptions:  we have assumed a steady number of members in affiliated societies and we don’t have all our future project costs.   Cashflow Forecast v1