Sunday, 25 February 2007

Budget realities

This morning I resumed work on WCVS’s 2007-08 budget. When I started this exercise back in the autumn, things did not look good. To be truthful, they looked pretty bad.

Since that time, we have agreed a contract with Connexions and we have had some good news from the Big Lottery and Watford Borough Council have confirmed their funding for three further years. So things are looking far, far better.

But despite these three major successes, things are still Not Good Enough. So today I carefully examined the three most vulnerable expense areas: investment in IT, staff training, and salary costs.

For any organisation, these are absolutely critical areas of future investment. But when expenditure exceeds income, what else can you do? There is always a fine line to be drawn between optimism and pessimism, between hope and fear, and between the present and the future.