Accounting for Non Accounting People

Nothing is costless or can exist without financial resources, not even in art organizations. A focus on the financial viability of an art organization is fundamental because it serves both internal functions (for art managers: to understand whether/how the organization sustains itself, make projections and ease decision making) and external functions (to show the solidity, feasibility of an idea; to assess its profitability or its financial resource needs and apply for funding). People who run or work with culture inevitably confront themselves with these issues but are rarely equipped with the basic accounting notions to treat them with ease. This guide will give some basic literacy to non-accounting people to be able to familiarize with numbers, their outlooks and meaning. Eventually, it will reveal how much numbers can tell, and why and how they should be kept under control (and not only by number specialists). This guide will be a short journey through the notion of costs (fixed and variable), revenues (how they can be generated in art organizations), and how costs and revenues relate in usable ways in budgeting, break-even analysis, and financial reporting.