What to put in front of the church council or a grant funder after an event

What does a grant funder actually want to see?

Reach, composition and consistency — usually in that order. How many people came, who they were in whatever terms the funder cares about, and whether the activity happened as often as you said it would. Money matters to them mainly as evidence that the project is viable and that their grant was not the only thing holding it up.

The board report covers a quarter rather than an event, because that is the reporting period almost every funder and council uses, and it counts free places separately. A holiday club where two thirds of the places were given away is a strong reach story and a weak revenue story, and a report that merges them tells neither.

Where do the income numbers come from?

From the double-entry ledger the payouts settle against — not from a balance column updated alongside it. Every movement of money is a balanced set of ledger entries, and the report derives its figures from those entries.

The consequence is the one a treasurer cares about: what the report says and what reached the bank agree, and if they ever did not, the ledger would not balance and the transaction would have failed rather than committed a wrong number. Gifts given during a sign-up are stored separately from the price of the place, so "what the supper took" and "what people gave" never merge.

• Quarterly activity: how many events, how many places, how many attended.
• Free places, counted apart from paid ones.
• Income taken, derived from the ledger.
• A breakdown by whatever your sign-up form asks — nothing more.
• The same figures as a CSV, to attach to a return or paste into a spreadsheet.

What demographic breakdowns can we report?

Whatever your own form asks, and nothing beyond it. If the sign-up collects the size of a household, the report can break down by it; if it does not collect something, the report says so rather than estimating.

Two categories are excluded from every export and every AI feature absolutely: health information such as allergies and access requirements, and anything about a child. No funder question changes that, and there is no setting for it. If a funder needs numbers about children, they need them in a form your safeguarding policy already anticipates — which in practice means aggregate counts a person compiles deliberately, not a data export.

How do we show a funder that money is not being taken and lost?

Point at the payout rule: nothing reaches the church until two days after the event has actually taken place, and there is no mechanism for an advance. For a funder or an insurer, that is the answer to "what happens if the retreat is cancelled" — the money is still there to refund, because it was never released.

It is also worth being able to say plainly that a person who chose zero under pay-what-you-can, a household given a free place, and a household that paid full price are three distinguishable rows in your own data and one identical experience at the door.