Accounting for activists

I was hoping to have been able to announce a couple of new initiatives, but world events have postponed them.

I can write about one of them. I had agreed to deliver some training events for UCU, designed to explain accounting to officers and branch activists and explain methods of getting information out of university management. The first three events should have started this month.

If you have general questions about university accounts and financial information, then you can post them here or email me and I will try to answer some questions through the blog. If I have time, I will try to make some of my training materials available on this site.

I am still taking commissions for in-depth and “scoping” reports on individual universities. If you think you might want some help working out how coronavirus is going to affect your institutional finances, do drop me a line. In general, I think the sector has been far too casual about the vulnerabilities in the standard business model and many universities were already struggling before the virus arrived. I was already expecting our first “market failures” / interventions of the new funding regime this calendar year.