Governance and finance

This resource is designed to help you produce a finance policy for your music group. It focuses specifically on charities. If your music group is not a charity, many of the principles will still be useful but the specifics around the Charity Commission / OSCR and HMRC will not be relevant.

The template contains suggested headings for a financial policy. The notes in each section explain what sort of thing to cover in that section, along with some example wording. The wording will not be right for all groups, so you should adapt it to suit you needs.

In this recording of our webinar, we introduced the new Making Music Safe service in partnership with Brass Bands England (BBE), which will provide members with the information and tools required to comply with legislation around child performance.

How Basingstoke Ladies' Choir transformed their communication and strengthened their community — Hazel Green shares their experience. 

How did you manage the group before?

Our group had a very limited website, which made members feel a little distant from the choir; it wasn’t easy to use or edit and felt uninspiring, containing only three back-end sections.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) plays an important role in the character and culture of your group. It shows your members, potential members and the world in general that you are taking action to ensure you are an open, inclusive and welcoming group.

This guidance specifically covers Finances in the Making Music Platform. Before reading this, please ensure that you have read our help guide on Getting Started with your Making Music Platform.

All of the Making Music Platform help guides and latest Platform News can be found on the MM Platform Service Hub page.

We have put together an accounts template to help you manage your finances.

Gift Aid is a government tax relief that allows charities to claim an extra 25p for every £1 that an individual donates. There are rules within the Gift Aid legislation that also allow charities to claim Gift Aid on membership subscriptions, even though they are not donations. This guidance is about claiming Gift Aid on membership subscriptions.

These days, in most cases all it takes is a quick swipe of plastic to pay for something. With people increasingly expecting to pay by card, it can be extremely worthwhile for a leisure-time music group to take card payments. 

Whether payments are being made for member subscriptions, on the door ticket sales, donations or for merchandise such as CDs, a card reader and Point of Sale (POS) system can be very handy.

This guidance describes the current situation with regard to Gift Aid and the voluntary music sector. Please note that Gift Aid is available to UK recognised charities, regardless of whether or not they are also registered charities.