However much arts organisations may resist the notion that they are ?businesses?, the truth is that wise financial decisions are just as important for them as for profit-driven organisations.
The potential for realising VAT windfalls should certainly be raising questions at Board meetings across the country in the wake of the European court ruling that led to a £596,000 VAT rebate for the Brontë Society (p8). But just as important as finding new pots of gold is the process of hanging on to existing ones, and the case of Made in Wales (p3) provides a salutary tale for arts charities. Just how many arts organisations have set up the sort of water-tight financial controls advocated by the Charity Commission (and exhorted by Mahmood Reza ? ArtsProfessional issue 34, September 2002) to prevent fraudulent use of their funds? Probably not as many as we might hope. The problem is that an organisation?s accounts are guaranteed to induce a glazing-over in the eyes of many Trustees and Board members. They may feel ill-qualified to comment on the financial statements placed before them and others view them as an unpleasant diversion from the relatively enjoyable task of discussing artistic policy. The consequences of failing to control the finances, however, are probably only too clear to Board members at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre (p3), who are having to make 63 people redundant. This is, no doubt, an even less enjoyable task than spending a few hours learning how to interpret a set of accounts.