A year of surprises, 2020 was a different year for Battersea Loughborough Lake Association. The virus lockdown prevented our US-based residents from coming up to their cottages. Our Board of Directors decided that the slowdown in economic activity was likely to negatively impact our local businesses and took the decision not to charge for advertising in the 2020 newsletter. Instead, we put the business cards and advertising graphics in the newsletter free of charge, a support to our advertisers who have in turn supported us over the years. We also worked to reduce our lake association expenses, by creating only one newsletter and distributing that digitally rather than using paper and the post office. The additional benefit of such is that it also reduces our carbon footprint. The AGM was a Zoom meeting, avoiding rental and refreshment charges. Web hosting costs and FOCA charges were reduced from earlier years.

There was some cost to this; our annual expenses were $407 higher than our revenues. Deferred revenues – the revenue that we receive from multi-year memberships but cannot recognize until next year or the following year – went down $620. In the end, overall cash, bank and GIC balances declined by $1,027 during the year with the total ending up at $9,385.

Despite the shortfall, the lake association is still on sound financial footing. It is expected that advertising will be solicited in 2021 and some of the cost reductions achieved in 2020 are anticipated to be ongoing.

One thing that did not happen this year was the creation of a high-falutin’ double-entry accounting system as discussed in the last newsletter. Board member Catherine Sutton and I did not get to it during the year. The existing spreadsheet accounting system held together (just fine, thanks…) and that project upgrade remains for another day.