Financial Presentation – St Barts - 25/09/2022
The reason I’m up here today is to give you an update on the current state of the Church finances. We realise that, whilst PCC are given regular updates, we haven’t updated the parish as a whole since the APCM.
We knew, at the beginning of the year, that this would be a difficult year, as several of our major donors had died or moved away, creating a hole in our finances. The budget signed off by PCC therefore forecast an overall deficit of £9,000. However, we were also aware that we had some legacies coming in from those who had passed away, which would cover these losses and give us time to rebalance the books.
The current situation is, in fact, significantly worse than anticipated. General Giving so far this year is over £5,000 below budget and more than £12,000 down on last year. We have tried hard to reduce costs, including putting on hold the replacement of Susan Reid in the church office. However, we are currently showing losses of approx. £6,000 for the year to end August and anticipate overall losses will be in the region of £15,000 by year end.
Looking at the figures, the major issue is the drop off in regular donations from the church family.
Here are a few figures which illustrate the point:
Diocesan advice is that the percentage of parish income which comes from regular donations should be around 75%. Ours is currently at 61%.
There are currently 191 people on our electoral roll which can be broken down into 129 family units.
- 23 families contribute almost 60% of our regular income.
- 54 families – just over 40% - have not made any identifiable donations to the general fund in the last 2 years
- 73% of our regular income is from people in retirement
We talk a lot about our Mission and our outreach into the local community – things like the warm centres initiative, which Rod Shelton has been helping to organise, which aims to provide warm spaces for people over the winter months when heating costs are rising. We very much intend to be a part of this, but heating our buildings costs money, the same as everywhere else. If we want to continue to support this sort of initiative, and demonstrate our role in the community, we need more people from within the church family to step forward and help us to find the funds.
Heather Stanley
Hon. Treasurer