Catholic Women’s League of Canada | BC and Yukon Council

Submitted by: Elaine Audet

Madam President:

Good afternoon everyone. As your provincial treasurer I have fulfilled my duties as outlined in the Treasurers handbook, paid the bills in a timely fashion, deposited the money, prepared and distributed financial statements at Fall & Spring Mid-term meetings and Provincial convention. Served on Development Fund selection committee and tried to do everything asked of by my president as prompt as possible.

My goal as reported last year was to set up the books on the computer using Simply Accounting. That was done and I made it through my first year with everything balanced. Hoorah! I am very happy to have learned a new skill and hopefully one day to say I have mastered it.Provincial Development Fund – only 3 applicants – using $390.86 of $2010.50 available. Keep this in mind for 2008 as we will have a healthy amount of money $3,977.14 available.

We had one application for Development Fund #2 for $1000 to help a Diocesan president with travel to national convention.

In her recent communiqué, National Secretary-Treasurer Peggy Roche, talks about Audit and Examining at Year end. She says, at parish level, a member knowledgeable in parish council activities & financial undertakings, with banking or bookkeeping experience, could be invited to examine the council books. At Diocesan or Provincial levels, however, a professional audit of accounts may be advisable if the transactions & monies handled merit auditing standards at professional fees. The decision to “examine” or “audit” is made by the council concerned.

Everyone should have a copy of the balance sheet & income statement from Jan 1/08 to April 30/08.
I want to touch on the per capita fees. The total membership for 2007 wound up at 9094 with another 73 rec’d in 2008 equaling 9167. From Jan 1 – Mar 31/08 we had payment for only 2,810 members. We now receive a report detailing # of members from each Diocese with a further breakdown of # in each parish council. Not showing on this statement is another payment just received bringing our membership up to $3,406. This is way down from memberships we had at this time last year, so I talked to Diane Haven, membership person at National office. They had a huge number of memberships come in end of Feb & have completed the imputing of 2 piles out of 5 – so we are hopeful to see some very large remittances in the next 2 months. We are still hoping for 10,000 members in BC & Yukon!

We had our first second midterm meeting end of Jan 2008- the cost for this is showing on here. Most of the convention expenses are not showing here yet, so that will bring our expenditures up quite a bit. Be assured that the provincial executive is trying hard to be good stewards of your money.

GIC’s -Last year we added the $7,500 to our $50,000 provincial development fund when it came up for renewal in Sept 07 – this gives us more interest for delegate awards for travel to provincial conventions. You will remember we put $6,000 into a separate fund to be used for Education & Training. So far this year, we have used $1,370.91 for Leadership Development workshops in Kamloops, Nanaimo & Vancouver, leaving $4,629.09 in this fund.

The new GIC is the $1.00 extra per capita fee that we are investing to have a sum of money available for when we next host the National Convention. We will be adding to it again this year.

As a note, we need to keep at least $40,000 set aside in term deposits as a cushion equaling approximately one full year’s expenses.