5th September 2008, 03:23 PM
Quote:quote:Originally posted by beamo
'If there is surplus it should be used for other archaeological related projects such as publicy/archaeological research.'
Earlier in this thread Redearth asked what happens to profits made by charities. When I worked for an archaeological unit that was also a registered charity, profits were known as 'operational surpluses' and were ploughed back into the unit. The money was used for training and also to support non-chargeable personnel such as outreach officers.
What is different about the units that operate as charities is that there are no directors, shareholders etc to take a cut of profits - all surpluses can be used directly by the organisation or banked to cover potential losses in future years, although the Charities Commission will take a dim view if cash reserves are very high and there is little evidence of activities that give rise to charitable status.
Beamo
The non-charitable archaeological organisations I have worked with also put much/all of the 'profit' back into the company, dealing with other non-profit making archaeological issues (not least the jobs where the client doesn't pay for months..... if you are still having to pay your staff and overheads it costs money if the cheque is even a day late!). And in the case of many fieldwork organisations, there aren't external shareholders, the archaeologists are the owners/directors/shareholders.
If you set up your own organisation, you have to get the starting capital from somewhere. The organisation I partly owned for a while was mostly set up with our redundancy money. We risked out future financial wellbeing, I don't see why we shouldn't get some return for that!