‘The boring shit’ #3 - running budget
This is something my dyspraxic brain has always struggled with. I think since numbers and dates and time confuse me, maybe money over time is just too much to get my head around. Oh wait thats cashflow? Okay never mind.
There’s a very specific feeling I get which I associate with my brain not being able to do something because of neurodiversity. Its a really fluffy, annoying feeling of ‘bamboozled’. Like no matter how hard I try, I just can’t compute the information. That’s what I get with the running budget, or even trying to explain what I’m recording and why I’m confused.
Anyway luckily I was able to share this with the amazing Pippa Frith (Exec Producer of Fierce Festival), who is someone I actually feel comfortable expressing my bamboozlement to. She showed me some examples of how her documents work, and I made this new system.
Here are some images of an example template:
[ID: a budget spreadsheet (see audio for full description) ]
‘Cash budget’ is the amount you have assigned to that budget area.
‘Spent’ is money that has actually left the bank account.
‘Committed’ is money you have committed to pay, but not yet paid - eg. fee instalments.
[ID: example of a formula in the budget spreadsheet. Remaining = Cash Budget minus ((SUM:spent column)+(SUM:committed column)) ]
‘Remaining’ = Cash budget - (Spent + Committed).
At the bottom of the sheet, the Remaining total should match the bank account.
In order to ‘reconcile’ the bank account, you need to go through each bank statement and check that all the transactions are listed in the budget and have a receipt or invoice number.
(Please please have a separate bank account for receiving grants - aside from being best practice it makes everything so much easier).
The spreadsheet should have several tabs, so you don’t have to look at too much information in one place.
My example has a tab for a list of invoices and receipts, this is where you record them and assign them a number, eg. when you buy something and there is a paper receipt, you can file it or take a picture and enter the data in the sheet, and give it a number. These can just be consecutive numbers for a list which includes both invoices and receipts. When an invoice comes in you can rename the file to include the new number.
Then a tab for the running budget, and a separate tab for the ‘original’ or ‘submitted’ budget. This is the one submitted in the funding application, so you have a record. When you start the project and probably need to modify the budget, you can just start a new one which will become the running budget and re-assign the headers there. When you do the evaluation then you can compare the original budget to the running budget.
‘The boring shit’ #2 - filing system
I have never had a good filing system. Working with audio and video, I am constantly saving source files and multiple versions of the same project.
Sounds are so hard to file! How do you categorise them? Names like ‘crunchy 2’ are everywhere.
Then how do you deal with versions? Every single time I end up with ‘[filename] final final FINAL THIS ONE’.
Then there are the random project files the software creates which I have no idea what they are and always have some extension I can’t understand, but I assume are necessary for something? And I always forget to set it up properly so the files are just saving to some completely inconvenient location and they all get split away from the project files and then when I come to put it all back together its just a mess.
Hoping to solve this, I worked with my Access Support Worker to research how other artists - like video and sound editors - deal with filing.
One major consideration was that I work in projects which span different media types - so the existing system of Documents, Pictures, Music, Movies on a Mac wasn’t really helping me. It would be better to somehow group those things together by project first.
This tutorial was really helpful (and quite short).
These were the main things I learnt:
Project name
Use the project name in every filename
Create a short code eg. the first 3 letters of the project name
The aim is to make the files searchable - so if you search that code all those files show up
(Often I don’t have a project name at the start, so I decided this): Choose a code at the start & replace it systematically later if the project name changes
Key words
Choose key words for filenames & always use the same - this is to tell you without doubt what is in the file
I looked at the types of files I usually have for each project and chose one way to name them (to avoid having multiple words for one file type eg. audio, sound, samples, recordings).
v.1, 2, 3 etc and ‘Submitted’ are there to avoid the curse of ‘final final 2 FINAL’ :)
With the sound & video I decided to use the venue name to show it was a final version, and which performance it was for.
Filename format
Naming every folder & file the same format eg.
So ‘ExP’ is the project code for ‘Example Project’, then it is followed by ‘proposal’ to show what is in the file, and v.1 to show the version.
Hopefully when I go to the folder, I can scroll to the latest file version just by selecting the highest v. number.
Then, when I send something off for instance a grant application, I should save that version as ‘submitted’.
This is how I named the folders.
The numbers are just there so the Mac displays them in the right order - this helps my brain somehow.
Each project should have quite similar folders, but they can also be modified to fit the types of files needed for that project.