Clubs Accounts

[Eastendtales]

4 hours ago, Piracy said:

Easy Tiger, small steps 😃 

Sorry I'm already aboard the hype train,

 Choo ****ing choo here we gooooooooo

[Piracy]

9 minutes ago, Eastendtales said:

Sorry I'm already aboard the hype train,

 Choo ****ing choo here we gooooooooo

Full steam ahead 

[Piracy]

I've copy & pasted the answers to my questions from the email reply I recieved last Friday morning from Drew Main. As I said in my summary post of the meeting I missed the first hour of the meeting and most of what I had asked was answered in that first hour. All listed below.

1. Exactly how has the club managed to make a trading loss of £1m + last season? 

The trading loss of around £1M can be broken down in a number of ways; relegation was expensive particularly in relation to prize money – approx. £120k for winning the league as opposed to around 3 times that amount for finishing mid table in the Championship. The club budgeted to finish 2^nd (probably as much not to tempt fate by assuming we’d win the league!) so although we got slightly more prize money we lost out on about £100k from play-off matches and had to pay out more in way of success bonuses to the playing and coaching staff. As everyone knows we now pay for the services of a CEO and Commercial Manager, roles previously carried out on a voluntary basis but deemed an important step by GmbH to further professionalise the club. We now have our own fully funded academy rather than contributing to FEFA – this equates to a cost of around 6 times more than we’d previously have spent in this area but another decision by GmbH as they see this as past of the long term strategy which I fully support. Finally, the cost of deciding to progress with the Rosyth project even following relegation, which meant a £96k bill to improve drainage even before we could start to install the artificial pitch.

2. It is now known that the club is only funding the current development at Rosyth because of £700k grant funding and an additional loan from Fussball for £300k, I’m assuming that is because the existing cash reserves of DAFC cannot adequately cover this? 

Your figures on the Rosyth funding aren’t quite right. The cost of installing the artificial pitch came in at £825k (up from the initial quote of £600k due to delays in obtaining planning permission primarily due to Scottish Water concerns and subsequent post Covid price hikes and inflation). £525k was received by way of grant funding with £300k coming from additional GmbH investment meaning that DAFC cash reserves are spent on DAFC.

3. Why Fussball are not converting their loans to shares to demonstrate they are fully committed to DAFC?

As you rightly point out, GmbH have yet to convert their loan note to shares. This is because they are still keen for the supporters to feel a part of the project. They could easily convert the loan notes tomorrow and not be answerable to anyone as the majority shareholder but that’s not the way they want to run the club. To me that demonstrates remarkable commitment to DAFC – they’ve given us all of the money for the shares whilst choosing to continue to operate with the status quo and with only 2 Directors on the Board.

4. It is now known that another hefty loss will be made this season (three large losses in consecutive seasons). How can the supporters have faith in the club’s current business model, with the cash reserves being depleted year after year?

I think your point about consecutive hefty losses was addressed and I can see you covered that off on your online post as well so nothing for me to add there.

 5. It’d be good for the supporters to understand, what is Fussball’s detailed and coherent business plan for the future?

It was pointed out last night that football must be the most difficult of businesses to produce a coherent business plan for as it can be extremely difficult to predict outcomes on the pitch which ultimately affect all parts of the business. All I can add is that the club are well aware of the need to be sustainable in the long term. The longer it takes to get back to the Premiership the more difficult that becomes. This also means not necessarily being reliant on lucrative cup draws, player sales and Covid grants as has been the case in multiple recent seasons. Numerous initiatives are being explored to increase revenue/reduce costs. Importantly, GmbH are fully aware and committed to the long term sustainability plan and are also aware of their funding obligations to achieve that. I can assure you that, under no circumstances would I continue to be involved and emotionally invested in the way that I am if I thought for one second that this was not the case.

 

[Piracy]

Club SLO, Drew Main has pointed out the club are looking at the present format of the meeting type held last Thursday to improve things on the communication front. 

What ever develops or transpires on that front we'd like to reiterate the offer always stands for any forum member to represent the EEB website at these meetings or indeed the larger supporters council meetings.

After these meetings first started I started with taking notes and providing feedback on the EEB. After admin discussions Digs then got involved representing EEB. We've also had both Superally and Grant providing excellent interpretations of the larger meetings from within the Purvis Suite that they attended.

Further involvement from forum members to provide feedback from these meetings while representing the EEB or representing themselves is 100% encouraged from our (EEB) perspective. 

Just for clarity, often there's feedback from both Digs and myself on here. That is because I help run a regular bus to the games and I represent that bus and Digs the EEB. There is 1 person representing each fan group. The fan groups represented are EEB, Dafc.net, DADSC, supporters buses, NW Section, Former Players Association etc (apologies to those I've missed).

[Digs]

I think the others are The Heritage Trust, Pars Supporters Trust, Young Pars have been in the past, Tappies Bus, the Rosyth Bus, Pars Business Club, Marv represented her Donation shop. It's not necessarily always the same groups as people can't always make it etc. 

Happy for others to go to these meetings if you're happy to provide updates so we can get the messages out there. 

[Grant]

6 hours ago, Piracy said:

I've copy & pasted the answers to my questions from the email reply I recieved last Friday morning from Drew Main. As I said in my summary post of the meeting I missed the first hour of the meeting and most of what I had asked was answered in that first hour. All listed below.

1. Exactly how has the club managed to make a trading loss of £1m + last season? 

The trading loss of around £1M can be broken down in a number of ways; relegation was expensive particularly in relation to prize money – approx. £120k for winning the league as opposed to around 3 times that amount for finishing mid table in the Championship. The club budgeted to finish 2^nd (probably as much not to tempt fate by assuming we’d win the league!) so although we got slightly more prize money we lost out on about £100k from play-off matches and had to pay out more in way of success bonuses to the playing and coaching staff. As everyone knows we now pay for the services of a CEO and Commercial Manager, roles previously carried out on a voluntary basis but deemed an important step by GmbH to further professionalise the club. We now have our own fully funded academy rather than contributing to FEFA – this equates to a cost of around 6 times more than we’d previously have spent in this area. 

Ach, trying not to be a grumpy ******* again but I'd love to see the Maths behind this. 

For starters as has already been established, mid table in the championship is double than what you get for winning League One, not treble.

 

 

 

And while we didn’t want to tempt fait with saying we’d win the league, it’s note tempting fate to presume we’d have 2 Home games, and 100k from the playoffs? Would the board be comfortable in releasing how much money they got from the previous seasons Championship playoffs, were they worth 100k? Or perhaps they could fire an email to Falkirk and ask them, they finished second in the league, did they get 100k from the playoffs?

 

 

 

An aspect of this continued talking about the title win costing us money that is genuinely starting to vex me, is surely we didn’t anticipate the crowds we got? Transfermarkt has us down as averaging 4,776 spectators, for a total of 85,969 tickets sold. Now as a comparison the year prior to that we had an average of 3615 which equated to 61,450 through the season (This was still the second highest in the league), are you telling me the board reckoned that with a relegation we would sell nearly 25,000 more tickets? It’s an absolute nonsense.

 

 

 

Also interesting to see our own academy is costing us 6 times more than FEFA, is that worth it?

1 hour ago, Digs said:

I think the others are The Heritage Trust, Pars Supporters Trust, Young Pars have been in the past, Tappies Bus, the Rosyth Bus, Pars Business Club, Marv represented her Donation shop. It's not necessarily always the same groups as people can't always make it etc. 

Happy for others to go to these meetings if you're happy to provide updates so we can get the messages out there. 

You do a grand job Digs 👍 

[Piracy]

Feel free to interpret the information for yourselves. I'll hold my own thoughts 

[Piracy]

"Ach, trying not to be a grumpy ******* again but I'd love to see the Maths behind this"

I did ask at the meeting about provision of actual figures, but I don't think we'll ever see them, unfortunately.

[Kaiser Chief]

Anyone is welcome to get in touch if they'd like further clarification of what's already been posted. 

Email andrew@dafc.co.uk 

[Raymie]

We won’t get a full P&L, which is a pity 

[DA-go Par Adonis]

1 hour ago, Raymie said:

We won’t get a full P&L, which is a pity 

When we did get a P&L in the accounts, it didn't say much either.  Let's say 22/23 went something like this (using similar levels of detail seen in the 2020/21 accounts).

Turnover:  £1.7m

Cost of Sales: (£2m)

Gross Loss: £0.3m

Administrative Expenses: £1m

Other Operating Income £0.3m

Net Loss:  £1m

 

Is that likely to have any positive effect?  

 

[DA-go Par Adonis]

Numbers are plucked out of thin air, to be clear.  I've no inside track - it's just clear that they've got to add up to -£1m.

[Piracy]

1 minute ago, DA-go Par Adonis said:

When we did get a P&L in the accounts, it didn't say much either.  Let's say 22/23 went something like this (using similar levels of detail seen in the 2020/21 accounts).

Turnover:  £1.7m

Cost of Sales: (£2m)

Gross Loss: £0.3m

Administrative Expenses: £1m

Other Operating Income £0.3m

Net Loss:  £1m

 

Is that likely to have any positive effect?  

 

According to David Cook none of our previous accounts gave profit & loss detail. 

[DA-go Par Adonis]

There was definitely a profit & loss account published before - anyone can download the accounts and see for themselves. 

He's not necessarily being economical with the truth if he said that it wasn't detailed, however.  

[parsforlife]

2 minutes ago, Piracy said:

According to David Cook none of our previous accounts gave profit & loss detail. 

I can't be ***ed trawling back far enough but certainly in later years prior to the outside investment we published the same minimal level of detail as we have now.  Maybe more detailed accounts were made available to shareholders etc, but not what was put on companies house.