Freud's Ball accounts

For the sake of complete transparency, even though this will be of very little interest to almost anyone reading this website, I’ve decided to explain a bit about the accounts from the Night-Before-Valentine’s Day Ball Ross and I organised as a fund-raising event in the February half-term. This will be very boring: I would not suggest reading it unless you are very interested in picking apart all the transactions my fund-raising money has been through. Rest assured it is all accounted for and now with Project Trust.

Costs of the Ball (money out):
We decided to split the costs and the profits (or losses) 50-50. In the end, little extra things meant this wasn’t exactly the case. For most of these extras, I paid using my own money from my own current account. For the major costs, however, I used the money from my Project Trust savings account (which I set up when I started fund-raising) which had either been donated to me or fund-raised through other events (see the break-down of accounts on the right-hand side of this website). It is the money from my fund-raising account which is of primary concern here.

The cost of the venue was £1272.43; therefore, I paid £636.43 from my Project Trust account (Ross paying the other £636). Freud’s (the venue) also asked for a £450 deposit, which I paid all of using my Project Trust account; Freud’s kept £180 as ‘gratuities’ to the staff (this was in the contract), and £270 of this was returned to me.

Ignoring for now the fact that some of this deposit was later returned to me, money transferred out of my Project Trust account to pay for the ball therefore equalled:

£450 + £636.43 =
£1086.43 (in fact I transferred £1087 for simplicity).

Money from the Ball (money in):
After the ball, I received the £270 returned deposit, which I paid back into my Project Trust account. From ticket-sales to the ball we raised £1330 (since this is not a multiple of £15 – the price of the tickets – this is a little mysterious). From this, I took out £817, leaving £513.

This meant I had:

£270 + £817 =
£1087

I was therefore even. The remaining £513 I gave to Ross. This meant that he was

£636 - £513 =
£123 short

To even the losses, I wrote a cheque to Ross from my personal current account (i.e. not money fund-raised for Project Trust) for my half of the loss, which amounted to:

£123 / 2 =
£61.50

Therefore, Ross and I both made a £61.50 loss. However, because I had paid this loss using my personal account, as far as my fund-raising was concerned, I had plugged this loss with my own money, and so no money fund-raised for Project Trust was lost.

As can be seen, the actual sale of the tickets proved to be… interesting. Our plan was to sell them through friends at various schools prior to the ball, and then sell any remaining ones on the door. As people came through the door, we either took their tickets or put to one side the tickets they bought on the door; this meant at the end of the night we had a fairly good estimation of how many people had come. While some of these got their tickets free (we allowed distributors to keep a free ticket for themselves if they sold 10), we counted 126 tickets taken in on the door. Our takings should have therefore equalled:

126 * £15 =
£1890

Obviously, this is quite a bit more than was actually taken. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that it took some time for money to trickle back to us, after the ball, from distributors. Because some money was in the form of cheques, we didn’t want to leave it too long before cashing this money, so after a couple of weeks we did our accounts (as above) and called it a day with a loss of £61.50 each. Since then more money has trickled in, and I have been putting this in my personal current account until it totals more than £61.50, at which point we will have started making a profit, and I will put it into my Project Trust account. This has not yet happened, sadly, but we’re pretty close to it.

The second reason is because we suspect some distributors to have been less than honest with what happened to all the tickets they had in their possession. Unfortunately, our faith in the fundamental good nature of people was clearly a bit out of proportion with reality, and we suspect we were taken advantage of in this instance. Of course, since distributing was done in a fairly informal manner, it makes it quite difficult to over-come this, and so we have simply drawn a line under our accounts, which fortunately didn’t result in a very large loss.

So, while the ball was a great evening, as a commercial enterprise it wasn’t a huge success. However, we learnt some lessons from it, and hopefully any other Project Trust volunteers (or anyone else, for that matter) who might read this may benefit from it: keep a very close handle on all of the tickets, and don’t rely on people being generally honest (this is slightly unfair: many people were a great help, without us even asking them, and they deserve a lot of thanks; unfortunately, because of the few, it makes it difficult to rely on people’s good-nature when trying to make money).

Discrepancies and reassurances

Amazingly – considering the amount of money that seems to be flowing in and out of my two bank accounts (personal current account and Project Trust savings account) as I try to ride the wave of fund-raising without being sucked down into the depths – I have so far managed to keep track of every penny donated, and as of today have safely sent every one of them to Project Trust, and accounted for all of it down the right-hand side of this website. However, you may notice that the total on my Justgiving website is not the same (currently totalling £45.13 more). Where does this discrepancy come from?

The reason is that at the fund-raising information evening I attended earlier this month I discovered that Gift Aid given on any donations does not actually go towards my total, but goes to Project Trust as a whole. Of course, this by no means means you shouldn’t ‘Gift Aid’ any donations – Project Trust need the money to keep operating, as well as to go towards the £500 they raise for each volunteer on top of the volunteer’s fund-raising. However, it does mean I haven’t counted any Gift Aid in my total on this website, whereas the Justgiving website automatically includes the Gift Aid from any donations made through the website in the total.

Make sense?

Addendum

And to add to the excitement, I went to a Project Trust fund-raising workshop this evening, and bought myself a nifty Project Trust Volunteer polo shirt. The actual evening itself wasn’t hugely informative, but it was good to touch base with Project Trust again. Perhaps a photo of the shirt (maybe even with me in it) will wing its way onto this site someday soon.

Return of the Blogger

It’s been a while since the last post, at first because I was too busy to write one, and then because so much had happened that just composing the post became quite a daunting task. However, once again natural apathy was defeated, and the long-awaited round-up is here.

January kick started on a high with Hogmanay in Edinburgh with Louise, but an interview at Dundee University (who have still not got back to me…) and three A-level modules tried their best to stop the year becoming one long party. However, once they were over, the way was clear to finish preparations and start selling tickets for…

… the Night-Before-Valentine’s-Day Ball!

Of course, first I got the flu quite badly a couple of weeks before, and then Ross caught it off me.

However, the preparations all came together. The venue was Freud’s on Walton Street, Herbie got the tickets printed for us at a discount, ice cream was provided at a 75% discount by George & Davis (my work), the live jazz band, composed of Heff (trumpet), Hal (guitar), Fraser (double-bass), Yogi (keyboard), and Cam (drums), were bloody amazing and it’s just lucky it was their first gig together so they didn’t think to charge us; DJ Switchdoctor (Eddie) and the Milky Bar K.I.DJ (Gilly) provided us with some great tracks that kept everyone on the dance-floor till the end, and my mum and dad did sterling work selling tickets on the door and scooping ice cream. And of course, the brave staff at Freud’s valiantly held the fort.

In other words, it was a damn good night. Unfortunately, Ross and I had been a bit slow getting around to selling tickets, and when we did, did not have quite as clear lines of communication with the distributors at other schools as we should have; in the end, we made a loss of £20 each. Of course, given that the total cost of the ball was around £1500, this wasn’t a bad effort, and it was a small enough loss to plug it with our own money, so that no money fund-raised for Project Trust was lost. However, given that we collected in tickets as people came through the door, and thus estimated there to be over 100 people there, at £15 a ticket this means there is quite a discrepancy, and the reasonably large profit which we should have made never reached us. A lesson to be learned, clearly.

Nonetheless, the impact on fund-raising was minimal (it would have been nice to bump it up a bit more with a tidy profit, but not essential given success on other fronts), and based on the comments people have said to me, the ball – as a ball, rather than a fund-raising vehicle – was a unanimous success.

Three days before the ball it was my 18th, and in preparation for Guyana I was given a digital camera. This was well timed, as it now means I have many photos of the ball, and they will be posted on here shortly. However, since then I have bought three books on digital photography, as I quickly realised that a nice camera and a quality party do not necessarily mean good photos, so they may need a bit of touching up on the computer before put up for public viewing.

On other fronts, the Smarties tubes I handed out at work have been trickling in over the past week, and the final total for them was £86.20! This was far more than I had expected (helped in large part by Phil & Andrea filling their tube with £1 coins – legends), and deserves yet another MASSIVE THANK YOU (there are a lot of those flying around now). G&Ds has been very supportive throughout my fund-raising so far, and has been a great place to work, with a great group of people, for the past two and a half year; so it’s a little sad now to be climbing down to one shift a week as I wind down towards retirement. A special thank you to Tom and Sally who have been there throughout (and for their Smarties tubes, too).

Other donations from individuals and charities are also continuing to come in, but in particular the school Christmas Carol Service collection was another big success, with half going towards my Project Trust fund-raising, and the other half going to another worthy charity. Thanks to the generosity of many parents (and the festive spirit) this raised over £900, of which £453.05 went to Project Trust on my behalf.

On top of all that, I had another interview, this time at Bristol University (again, for Medicine), last Monday. Still no word from any of the universities, but that means no rejections so far as well as no offers. It’s always fun to string out the stress.

However, while fund-raising is not yet complete, and while I have not yet heard from universities and have to wait until Thursday next week to get my marks for my January modules, the finishing line for these various projects is, hopefully, within sight. The grand total for all my fund-raising so far, therefore, is £3157.6, or 79.94% of my total, with another £250 promised by one charity. That’s not bad going, given the deadline is July.

That does mean that time is rapidly passing, and now that I have the dates for my training course (back on Coll), departure for Guyana seems to be getting a lot closer. I’ve been buying books about South America, travelling, travel photography, travel writing, and pretty much everything else, and planning kit-lists (fortunately most of which I already have). Next up is immunisation jabs, of which there will be many. It’s amazing, and I can’t wait to get away (especially after reading Max’s blog), but sometimes it does catch you, the thought of being away for 12 months – that’s a long time not to see anyone back home.