So, you've joined an RSPCA Branch Committee?

The first thing that will probably strike you is that there's a lot of paperwork and that meetings are run to a fixed agenda that may seem bureaucratic until you get used to it. Meetings start by reading through the minutes of the previous meeting and checking that everyone agrees they are an accurate record. This may appear tedious, but it's vital to have written proof of what was actually agreed if there are problems later on.

A branch committee meeting is only allowed to make decisions if there are at least 4 elected committee members present.

The next thing is that really quite frighteningly large sums of money are involved. In our case the bill for animal boarding runs at roughly £2,000 each month. The basic fee to staff our animal clinic is £2,500 and on top of that there are costs for veterinary treatment of the animals we take in and general items like rates, heating and repairs. 

As a branch, our life is a constant balancing act between not going bust altogether and constant demands to find, "just another £200" in order to save an animal's life.

The trouble is that ONE payment of £200 is not much in relation to our turnover BUT £200 repeated every day would finish us off unless we can increase our income.

Cash flow figures for 2008

Just finished the spreadsheet of the accounts for 2008. The final figures in the branch Annual Report will be a bit different because these are adjusted for money owed by us (e.g. invoices for work done during the year not sent until the following month) or to us (e.g. VAT rebates not yet received). However the "raw" cash flow figures give an impression of the financial situation:

Total income: £378,880

Total expenditure: £242,877

Of this, £66,549 was spent on running the animal clinic, £40,515 on veterinary treatments at private vets and £33,237 on boarding animals until they could be rehomed. £61,860 was the overheads of running our three shops (including rent, rates and staff wages). 

Shop profits suffered a drastic fall to just a tenth of the amount we made in 2007. Considering the terrible general state of retail sales, we may have been lucky not to have actually made a loss.

Held together with 'laccy bands and bits of string

Many of the people who come into contact with us for one reason or another get very frustrated because they feel we're not delivering the standard of service they expect. Conversely, many of the people we pay to provide some of those services aren't at all happy about the degree of pressure they're working under and the way the public often expect them field complaints about aspects of the RSPCA that aren't anything to do with them.

Clinic this morning was a case in point. One of our clients had bred some puppies from his bitch and one of them had diarrhoea. As the puppy was only three weeks old he was a bit reluctant to bring it to the surgery and he'd got it into his head that we ought to be able to diagnose and prescribe on the basis of a stool sample. He phoned in; argued with the volunteer receptionist about this and she took his number so that one of the vets could call him back. They were horrendously busy that morning and didn't get finished seeing patients until mid-day, at which point they still had several animals needing to be admitted to the hospital as in-patients and a string of other telephone call-backs to make.

By this time, Mr X. was pretty peeved that he'd not been called back yet, and decided to phone me on the out of hours number. All I could do was reiterate that the puppy really needed to be seen (otherwise there's no way to tell whether it's getting dehydrated) and that I would leave a message asking the vets if it was possible to call him a.s.a.p. Strictly speaking at this point I was asking them to bend the rules as the puppy a) could have been taken to the morning session and b) wasn't registered with the clinic (although its mum is) so isn't covered by our agreement with the Vet School to see registered patients outside normal hours in an emergency. Twenty minutes later he still hadn't got to the top of the urgent call-backs and phoned me ranting and raving that we didn't care about animals and why should he have to wait when his puppy was ill.

I am afraid that the answer is that you get what you pay for. Our annual turnover is around £200,000, which is a frighteningly large amount for a group of volunteers to raise. It relates to an annual demand for help for around 3,000-4,000 individual animals—less than £100 per animal. That means we have to do things on the cheap wherever possible. Our value to the University for student teaching means they charge us a lot less than a commercial rate for veterinary services, but it does mean consultations take longer (because the qualified vet needs to discuss the animals' conditions with the students). If we could pay the University enough for them to employ an extra vet at each session that would decrease waiting times, but that would mean raising at least another £40,000 every year. Similar considerations explain why our telephone availability is less than perfect (we're mostly volunteers taking calls in our spare time, not paid reception staff).

July statistics

Just got the records for July collated. During the month, our branch:

Provided low-cost veterinary treatment for 205 dogs, 115 cats, 11 rabbits and 14 miscellaneous small animals.

Rehomed 4 dogs, 3 cats and 2 birds.

Microchipped 11 dogs and 10 cats

Neutered 13 dogs, 12 cats and a rabbit

Our total outgoings were £16,904 (this amount also covers wages for our three shop staff, rent for the charity shop in Newmarket and our annual audit fee). We raised £7,811, mostly from sales at the charity shops and clinic fees.