MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Resource distribution systems
Systems
Systems relating to distribution of resources
7.7. There is a budgetary system in UNiFI which seems to be in a state of
flux. The Financial Officer explains:-
For the last two years at least, ever since the new union was
formed, the budgeting has been centralised. In old BIFU it used
to be devolved up until two or three years before the merger. I
would send out pro formas to all the budget holders asking how
much money do you want next year, they would come in
common be reviewed by myself and by the Finance Committee
and by the Management Committee and endorsed by the NEC,
along with the process. This meant that the budget holders had
an input which admittedly was slashed right back because of the
financial constraints. The last two years of BIFU and the last
two years here, the situation has been such that we have not
done that. There has been no point because the funds available
have been so limited that it would have been a waste of time,
quite frankly. So they have been told how much they have got
to work with. In old BIFU I used to send out monthly report to all
the budget holder saying this is your spend this month,
cumulative data to this month and it is the budget. And I related
it back to the pro forma which they had completed saying what
they perceived the year-end position to be. I didn't then control
it, it wasn't controlled but it was all monitored and the figures
were available. Controlling a committee's expenditure is, you
will appreciate, very difficult. Short of saying "you can't meet
again" and I can't recall BIFU ever saying to any committee that
it couldn't meet any more just because we had run out of money.
What we are doing now, and we are in the process of setting it
up, is a new finance system which we have introduced within the
new year which is actually putting information on the Internet so
that each manager can go into his own bit of the Internet and
pull up his budget position and fill in required information on that
and just send it back to the server and the server automatically
shoots it into overall sheets for my attention. It is in the process
of being done. It is at least six months down the line before the
first one actually works
So the system managers work to was one in which they had budgets
but to which they had little input before being told what they had to
spend. The General Secretary gives a little more detail about the
system:-
We are making people accountable for their budgets, to a large
extent. They cannot control the salaries but they can control
their committee costs and their meeting costs. There has to be a
fair amount of discretion on that. Nobody knew that the Royal
Bank of Scotland and NatWest would come together so there is
no point in saying to both those National Secretaries "you have
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