Crannog Apprentice Georgia writes about her experience as finance officer our the Celtic Yule event!
I am the finance officer for the Yule event. This means I’m in charge of all the money we spend, the prices we set products at and calculating the income. I also have to keep track of the volunteers, students, newsletter and footfall.
We had £400 which we could use to spend on the Yule event, so I made a spreadsheet of all the things we purchased, ensuring we kept to budget. We had to buy things like wire for making jewellery, cake ingredients, candle wax, packaging and lots more things to make the event different from normal tours. Some of the things we didn’t purchase and instead I had to source, for example the foliage to decorate the site, Hamish at Pictavia Leather kindly sent as some leather for our coasters and we collected all the pinecones ourselves.
I also set income targets for the total admissions, shop, café, and donation intake over the whole event. Rich helped me with this as we had to base it off last years income but as we are running a completely different event, on different days of the year and more days, it was difficult to do. We then set a rough daily average.
Setting prices for the products we sell at our stall was another one of my jobs. So for this, I spoke with Gill who works in the shop. We discussed how much it costs to make each item and how long it took to make and came up with a price. The prices were also based on our contactless donation machine so people could pay with cash or card. So for example we had clay decorations at £2, jewellery at £5 and a pack of 4 leather coasters at £10.
I also helped make items to sell at the stall. I made tree earrings and necklaces, some spiral jewellery, I pyrographed a lot of the leather coasters, helped make the clay decorations, made some clay pots for the candle making and did clay firing.
On the day of the event, I was mainly based on the stall selling items and doing the tombola. For this I had to note down everything that was purchased so we know how well items sold and to easily be able to calculate the total income from the stall. I had to ensure all the product were on show if items had been bought. At the end of the day, I calculated the income and during the end of day meeting I said how we did with finance, how we could improve, a comparison between the days and how we have done compared to our target.
I have really enjoyed doing the finance for the Yule event, as I have learnt a lot about how it works and what you need to keep track of as a finance officer.
(Funding for the apprenticeship programme kindly supported by the Gannochy Trust, Museums Galleries Scotland, Perth & Kinross Council and SSE Renewables)
