Finances

CSS tracks financial transactions via a spreadsheet held in the Google Drive. This is done as the statements we get sent by the Guild are (approximately, as of 13/05/2026) around 2 weeks behind reality, that is to say if a membership is purchased on the website on a given day, it may not appear on the statement until 2 weeks later, which can make financial planning tricky. Because these purchased show up on the purchase reports immediately, we can mitigate this by managing and keeping our own records of transactions by using those reports and compiling our own statement essentially. This can also help to identify problems with the guild's processing, as when you're cross checking the guild statement with ours it should be fairly easy to spot where a transaction has come through at a different amount than we expected. Most commonly this is VAT issues, where we expect the VAT to be paid for us but it hasn't been. See the VAT section for more details on this.

It's entirely valid to just imagine Guild society accounts as individual bank accounts, but this isn't actually accurate.

The Guild operates a “Journal” system - which is essentially where all the money across the entire Guild is held within a single actual bank account, which is then logically divided into virtual accounts (referred to as Journals) from an administrative point of view. Each account is it's own Journal. If you're interested in the accounting principles of this you can research it yourself, but I'm not going to cover it in this wiki and it's not necessary to understand the Guild system.

Money can be transferred between societies or guild departments by simply creating journal entries. No actual money moves in this situation, it's all still within the same bank account, it's just moved between virtual accounts. CSS doesn't typically need to make use of this, but it's handy when doing collaborations with other societies, or where we're paying another department for services, such as cleaning, bar staff or security.

This is the reason why neither SGF nor the weekly statements give an entirely accurate view of the current situation - expenses and income take time to be processed (and placed on our journal) after they hit the central guild bank account, which delays the weekly statements. The balance shown on SGF is slightly more up to date when it comes to expenses (as it updates the balance as soon as expenses are approved) but further behind when it comes to income as SGF itself has no visibility of group income until it hits the statement. This is why it's so important to keep our own records of what transactions we're expecting, because both SGF and the statements are limited and especially during busy periods may fall significantly behind the actual real world situation.