Something that I have picked up on in the past few years is that no one really talks about camp finances and organization. I don’t mean the chores and infrastructure but rather the back end of things, the things that happen before and after Pennsic or other large wars occur.
A couple of years ago I took over the camp organization / management of the Barony of Bergental’s camp. To be clear, I’m not the land agent. I’m just the person that organizes the information. I’ve made some discoveries since then and I thought I would share my little bits of gleaned knowledge from the experience.
How the Camp Functions
First I’ll give the bare bones on how our camp typically works. We have a land agent who takes on the registration and typical land agent duties. In addition, we have someone that takes on the mapping of our camp that works with the land agent. In addition we have a seperate person that spearheads the meal plan shopping and organization.
My responsibilities include budgeting, receiving the money for camp fees and meal plan money, spearheading the planning meetings and keeping meeting minutes, as well as making and keeping the camp registration forms and emergency contact forms for those that camp with us. Post Pennsic (our major war) I enter all the receipts, make sure reimbursements are issues and tracked, and compare our predicted budget with what we’ve actually spent.
Post Goals
My goals for this post is to hopefully start a conversation on how camps are run. What works and what doesn’t. Eventually I think I’d like to lead a discussion or create a class around this. To that end I will be talking about the tools we used to organize camp working from our camper’s first point of contact.
Face the World
Many camps work by invitation. To camp with them veteran campers invite others that they think might be a good fit with their camp. Our baronial camp is slightly different. Anyone is welcome to come and camp with us, provided they let us know. For some people it’s their first time going to Pennsic or are new and haven’t been invited to a camp yet. You don’t have to be a Bergental resident to camp with us. We have people from the West and Ansteorra camp with us as well. Some stay with us moving forward, others find camps more suited to their interests or become part of a household and join their own camp.
Discussion and Invites
When people want to camp with us, veteran members of the camp extend invitations to others. The first thing we have new camp mates do is join our Facebook group and/or the Google group. Both groups get the same informational posts. Meeting minutes, announcements, etc. This helps conversation happen between our camp mates that live too far to make it to the physical meeting.
We try to make the operation of the camp transparent and the Google group and Facebook group allow us to do that. Large expenditures have to be approved by all members at the meeting, such as upgrades to infrastructure like tents or heaters. If enough opposition is raised in the following discussions online than we reassess the decision to make those purchases. It’s all fairly straight forward.
How to Keep Track
I use a number of Google spreadsheets and forms to keep track of the camp finances and who’s coming. A lot of my forms and spread sheets tie in to each other, so I’ll try my best to cover that here.
Master Questionnaire
The master questionnaire is where everything begins. This comprehensive form asks for the arrival date, how many people in their family unit, how many tents and their footprint. I’ve posted a PDF copy of the Google Form below.
This form feeds into a spreadsheet which totals the amounts of people attending, how many are on the meal plan, etc. I take the foot prints of each tent with names and send them off to our camp map guru, who does the layout. I take the rest of it and put it into the yearly work book. I’ve embedded it below.
Complicated…But Not Really
This yearly workbook is composed of five separate worksheets. The first one is where we keep track of who’s coming, what they owe, and check boxes to indicate if they’ve paid. The bottom row totals everything so that I can see at a glance what’s going on. This sheet feeds into the “Budget Projection” sheet and the foundation for the camp finances, because of this we encourage everyone who can let us know if they are coming as soon as possible. The other sheets feed off these two sheets.
Budget Projection
This is where all the magic happens. This sheet is the basis for our entire year. The structure of this budgeting sheet is similar to what my shire uses for The sheet with names feeds into this sheet. The TRUE and FALSE columns play a really important part because the “Budget Projection” sheet uses formulas that rely on these two columns.
The cells for Adults Week 1 and the others pull information from the other sheet using the following formula or a variant:
=SUMIF(‘2020′!B3:B27,”TRUE”,’2020’!D3:E27)
In the dummy workbook I embedded above there are three groups of people registered. This is reflected in the participation cells. I can look at this and say okay, week one is going to have four people so far and week two is going to have six people. If I continue filling out the 2020 sheet with meal plans etc, that populates here as well by using a simple grab of information from the totals at the bottom of the “2020” spreadsheet, seen below.
Income and Expenses – The Meat and Potatoes of Camp Finances
The second part of the “Budget Projection” worksheet is the income and expenses. (See Below) These use basic SUM formulas to add the independent line items and subtracting the total of the expenses from the income.
Here the expenses include a lot of items. Ice, water, wood, and, because our common area tent is rented, tent, table and chairs. Expenses also include the space rental fee that we pay to Cooper’s for our trailer to be stored year round and a line item for “Emergency Camp Supplies” for when a cooler dies, hoses bust, or stakes go missing. I tried to think of all the yearly expenses and give us a little extra so that we don’t get surprised later on. Keep in mind that our expenses may seem rather high but we typically have a camp of anywhere from 25-30 people, including children.
Food and Truck
The food and truck line items in both the income and expenses cancel each other out. They are there so that I can see how much each of those budget items have for the year.
The truck line item pulls from the totals line and multiplies the total cubic footage by $2.50. We’ve rented the truck for several years and the average gas cost added to the truck rental cost and the tolls is divided by the total cubic footage of the truck.
The meal plan line items get added together and that is the total budget for the entire meal plan. The costs of the meal plan include dry ice for the freezer cooler, regular ice for the refrigerator coolers, water for cooking, and groceries of course.
Total Profit/Loss
At the bottom of the projected budget sheet is the Total Profit/Loss cell. This is the bottom line. Are we breaking even, in the hole, or in the black? This is REALLY important. The only real options for any camp is to break even or be in the black. Ideally, you want to be in the black before war. If you are just at the break even point after war, okay. For the next war you may need to change where and how you spend your funds. The important thing is to If the camp is in the red, it’s not viable. It’s all a matter of solvency and responsible spending.
Solvency
Solvency is definitely important for any camp. It’s not a business but it’s a definite investment. It’s a monetary and time investment. Every camp that I have seen that lives paycheck to paycheck, so to speak, will suffer eventually. All camps want to keep the camp fee low and accessible. However, there comes a point that the camp needs to have some money in reserve to replace parts of infrastructure that fail.
If your camp lives paycheck to paycheck and you have a common area tent fail or your stove decides to break where does the money come from to replace it? Camps need to have something in the piggy bank to take care of those things. By planning for the future you make it easier for yourself and your camp mates thinking about it now.
Above I’ve included a completed worksheet. With everything, you can see at the bottom in the Total Profit/Loss cell that we are black by almost $300 dollars. I’m not looking for another place to spend that $300, I’m holding that in reserve. We may end up needing it this year maybe not. It might be hotter than Hades this year, and we blow through ice and water for the camp. That’s what the surplus is for. If we don’t use it, then it can go in the bank for next year.
The sheet above is, in fact, our camp’s predicted budget for 2019 and the line items include everything that we needed last year. At this point we take our money and this sheet and go to war.
During War
During war there are a few things that have to be taken care of and they mostly entail keeping track of paper work. We moved to PayPal a couple of years ago and it’s been the best thing ever in regards to helping keep track of funds at war. The bulk of which is accounting for any cash withdrawls and reimbursements to individuals if they’ve purchased missing groceries etc.
PayPal
We have set up 3 seperate accounts in PayPal. One for general camp funds, one for the meal plan, and one for the truck. This has helped a lot as we can more clearly see what has come in and what has been paid out. It has also lessened the necessity of keeping much cash on hand which can be hard to keep track of. It’s made renting the truck, paying for an EZ pass, and gas purchases so much easier to track,
Ice Difficulties
There are a few points that have arisen that have proved a little inconvenient. The biggest of these is purchasing ice. The funds for ice to keep food cold is part of the meal plan funds and as such, come from a different account than the funds for the ice for the water cooler. We have tried a couple of different methods. The first is pulling the money allotted for ice purchases from both accounts and keeping it in individual zippered pouches with their relevant receipts. The second paying each with their respective PayPal cards directly. Both have their pros and cons but there’s no sure fix.
The one important thing to note is that our food coolers don’t need ice everyday. This means that using the card to pay for ice is only a mild inconvenience once and a while, so we’ve stuck with using the cards.
Our fellow campmate Eli of Bergental, made a great little form to keep track of personal ice, camp ice, and food cooler ice, which has helped enormously. I’m then able to match receipts to forms and keep track of what went where.
Post War
During the war I have to keep track of the cards and make sure all the receipts make it into the zippered pouch of doom. Post war is when things get interesting. A couple of weeks after I get home from Pennsic and the mountain of laundry has been washed I pull out the pouch of doom and all of my paperwork from ice runs.
Receipt Confetti
Now I have to reconcile all of my receipts and paper work. I sort my little bits of paper into piles for groceries, camp, and the Bergental water-bearing cart. In addition to all of this, I have to print out the transaction logs for each PayPal card so that I can make sure all of the out going funds are accounted for. I then enter all my final numbers into another tab in my workbook that is identical to the Projected Budget. There are years where some people don’t come at the last minute for whatever reason. Our policy is to refund their camp fee and meal plan and so some of the numbers may change.
Also, it’s important to note that I don’t keep the receipts forever. I will keep them for 5 years and then they will get tossed. I have one of those envelope sized accordion keepers that I keep everything in until it’s time to make room for another year.
Projected vs Actual
In addition to this, I enter the receipts into a master spreadsheet (where it will total the categories) and then these numbers (see image below) will be pulled into one last worksheet (Projected vs Actual) for the sake of a quick overview. I can then also then pull numbers easily to compare numbers year by year to see trends in expenditure.
That Seems Like a Lot of Work…
Yes, you might say that but honestly the most time consuming part was setting everything up. Entering the receipts is probably the second most time consuming thing. Overall though it’s not terrible since the worksheets do all the math. I do double check it though, just in case. This has helped our camp so much, we now have money squirreled away for a rainy day or emergency fixes. It lets everyone breathe a little easier and makes war a little easier as a vacation. It’s my humble opinion that the camp finances and planning needs to be transparent and well tracked.
Don’t Do It Alone
I don’t do this all myself either. I have an unrelated party go over all my numbers and count the cash and we both sign off on a printed report that we present at a camp meeting. It gets looked over by everyone at the meeting, and, barring any concerns, it gets filed away. Also anyone in our camp can ask to see the worksheets and information.
In addition to all of this I will send out a questionnaire at the end of Pennsic covering questions like what worked for you this year, what needs improvement, etc. In the spring, after the first couple of meetings, we send out another questionnaire. This one is in response to the one taken in the fall with 3-4 areas of improvement or changes. Some of these may or may not include purchases asking for our campmates to prioritize the projects. We keep a running list of potential improvements for precisely this reason.
The Take Away
As Scadians I think it’s important to share this kind of mundane information as well. I have seen many camps come and go for various reasons. Money or the camp finances should not be one of them. Learning and teaching others how to plan and maintain healthy camp finances is imperative for any camp that wants to survive. The fact that this isn’t taught or really talked about I think is something that needs to be changed. I know of a few camps that are struggling due to finances (which pandemic has not helped.) Others are simply struggling as many of their members are don’t come to large wars anymore for various reasons. In either case, the knowledge isn’t being passed down, like it should. So here’s my two cents worth and if anyone has questions you can always send me an email at perrodecroy “at” gmail dot com.