end of year financial report for Boston Bellringers (loosely speaking)

[lauradi rcn com]

     Boston Bellringers is the name chosen when we opened an account for 
the combined finances of the Advent and Old North/MIT guilds.  I like to 
think it's also emotion-based - if you feel in your heart that you are a 
Boston bellringer, you probably are. 
     We started the year with lots of money.  We have somewhat more lot of 
money now. I don't like the idea of using actual quantities of dollars in 
this kind of large group email.  If you want specifics, ask directly, but 
I may not reply until Monday.  There is a way (which I have forgotten) for 
sharing the Sheet of all the income and expenditures. Let me know if you 
want to see it. 
Largest single expenditures in 2022: Ringing World subscription (under 
$200) and new slider for ON (under $100)  
Largest income stream: weddings.  Largest single net income item: $100 
donation from a visitor. 

     The wedding money is sometimes connected to donation money.  The 
basic system is that we ask for $300 a wedding.  It involves some ringing 
and some waiting around time. Ringers are paid $30 each for the nuisance, 
pretty much the only time we ask to be paid to ring.*
It has been the case that some people didn't want to be paid, some only 
want to be paid part of that amount, etc.  For a good bit of the year, I 
noted how many people had been paid what each time. There has been 
discussion of this as subtly implying to some people that they should 
waive the money.  This is not the intent. A suggested solution was that 
every ringer be paid, and then it's up to the individual what to do with 
the payment, which includes the option to put it in the donation/petty 
cash box (the same space, and there is one in each tower).  Since I note 
donations on the spreadsheet (when I know about them), we can tell how 
much of the petty cash is from donations. 

     Speaking of petty cash - there is a fairly wide range of what people 
think should be in the PC boxes in general, so I came up with a compromise 
amount, and check on it occasionally.  If you buy something, one option 
would be to reimburse yourself from the box.  If you do this, please put 
in a receipt (Actual paper receipt from a store or handwritten estimate of 
what you paid).  Otherwise, ask me for reimbursement, with the same deal 
for receipts, although sometimes it is slacker than that.  I continue to 
leave a separate envelope for Boston Common parking tickets in the Advent 
box, but I don't go to the garage to do anything about it. 
     
     The RW/Bellboard organization requests (does not require) a donation 
for each performance. We've been pretty faithful about this, and last year 
agreed that the communal funds should pay for it.  For bureaucracy 
reasons, the simplest way to do it is for the person who posts the quarter 
(or whatever) to let me know, and I do the donation from the same account 
as our RW subscription.  We are more compliant than most - as of 11:15 on 
the 31st, only one of the top 5 liked performances has a donation.  That 
was the long length, and they bumped up the donation to reflect that it 
was a couple of peals worth, even though publishing it requires the same 
amount of ink or digits as a regular peal.
https://bb.ringingworld.co.uk/
 RW/Bellboard is raising the donation suggestion to 1 pound per person.  
Anybody have feelings about it?

     Should we be pledging/donating to the congregations?  We did this 
decades ago, then stopped.  We did a one-time thing in 2020.

* I was under the impression that the 1750 ringers asked to be paid, but 
having looked at the contract transcript on the ON curriculum page, it's 
the other way around - the ringers will pay the church three shillings for 
not showing up when requested to ring.
https://www.oldnorth.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Bell-Ringer-document.pdf
By one estimate we found online, three shillings in 1750 Boston would be 
about ten bucks in 2020 money, but Arthur is skeptical about the person's 
calculations. 

Laura