A budget-setting meeting. The people visible in the picture are (left to right) me, Joseph (the Director), George (the Treasurer), Charles (the Chairman)On Wed afternoon, just after I last blogged, a chance encounter occurred between me and a few other senior people in the school's management committee. Standing beneath the shade of a tree as the sun set, Bwana Chairman suddenly seemed to take the idea of setting a budget incredibly seriously. Given that the school has never really had a budget before, this is a remarkable turnaround. I guess it could be attributed partly to knowing that I ( frequently referred to as "Mr Sunday/Sunjoy/some other mispronunciation, finance expert from UK") will be gone after only 2 weeks. And there's also good old fashioned rational argument (you're meeting the parents next week - how will you know what next year's school fees will be unless you've created a budget?)
Much to my pleasure, the work of creating a budget was taken very seriously over Thursday and Friday, with the dedicated attention of a subgroup of the school's committee. At the end of that process, a summary of the budget was as follows:
Budgeted 2011 Income: 2 million Kenyan shillings
Budgeted 2011 Expenditure: 5 million Kenyan shillings
Amount of reserves at start of year zero
Needless to say, this is not good! As we were going through, I could tell we were heading for a disaster of a budget, but I thought it valuable to let the committee create this budget as a first draft. The budgeting sub committee agreed that drastic measures were needed to make the budget reasonable again, but were unwilling to do this without the rest of the committee, so the changes were left for the committee meeting that was going to happen on Monday.
I'm pleased that we managed to create a budget based on (moderately) decent assumptions in such a short space of time. Big credit must go to Jamie for this - she's the representative of Teach A Man To Fish, and spent some time going through some financial records before I arrived.
Much to my pleasure, the work of creating a budget was taken very seriously over Thursday and Friday, with the dedicated attention of a subgroup of the school's committee. At the end of that process, a summary of the budget was as follows:
Budgeted 2011 Income: 2 million Kenyan shillings
Budgeted 2011 Expenditure: 5 million Kenyan shillings
Amount of reserves at start of year zero
Needless to say, this is not good! As we were going through, I could tell we were heading for a disaster of a budget, but I thought it valuable to let the committee create this budget as a first draft. The budgeting sub committee agreed that drastic measures were needed to make the budget reasonable again, but were unwilling to do this without the rest of the committee, so the changes were left for the committee meeting that was going to happen on Monday.
I'm pleased that we managed to create a budget based on (moderately) decent assumptions in such a short space of time. Big credit must go to Jamie for this - she's the representative of Teach A Man To Fish, and spent some time going through some financial records before I arrived.
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