The role of the club treasurer will be to record and manage the club’s finances on a regular basis. It will also be the treasurer’s responsibility to report monthly finances to the club committee. However, it is the entire committee’s responsibility to help with the development of an annual budget that everyone agrees to and accepts.

The annual budget should take into account all finances required to run a club and will be split into forecasts for income and for expenditure. The treasurer will be able to report against this budget, so committee members can track whether membership subscription fees are adequate to meet the running costs.

A budget needs to forecast what kind of income the club is going to generate from different sources and what items will need to be purchased, how often and at what cost. To prepare a budget you will need to gather a range of information, dependent upon the type of club you are and what activities you undertake.

To make your budget plan work, you need to understand what will be the key components. These are called the assumptions. The income assumptions are the income streams such as:

• Subscriptions – match or training fees, charged weekly, monthly or annually
• Membership – senior, junior, social
• Sponsorship – look at what you have to offer potential sponsors
• Fundraising – generated through social events, a lottery or raffle
• Bar Income – if you own your facility
• Match Income –a senior team in the non-league system will generate income from admission charges or sale of programmes.

Calculating expenditure assumptions can be difficult but usually consist of”

• Facilities – hire of public pitches or upkeep of your own pitches
• Referees – match fee and travel expenses
• Kit – new playing kit and replacement kit and equipment
• Affiliations – county, FA and League registration fees for teams
• Travel – transport to away matches
• Development Plan – coaching and medical course and CRB costs.

Preparing the budget and knowing the amounts of income and expenditure is essential but equally important is understanding how this translates into practice and what your cashflow is actually going to be. Therefore plotting realistically when you expect the income from say sponsorship or a fundraising event is essential so that you can see whether you are going to have a cashflow problem in any given month.

This might help you decide how you might consider collecting in your subscriptions to ease cashflow or identify when in the year you need to hold your fundraising events.