The most important unpaid job in general aviation
Every shared aircraft has one. Sometimes they are elected, usually they volunteered, occasionally they simply failed to leave the room fast enough. They are the reason the aeroplane still has insurance, the hangar is still paid and the engine fund is not fictional.
The role is almost always undefined, which is the root of most of its problems. Here is what it actually involves.
The monthly cycle
Collect the flight data. Meter readings from every flight. In a well-run group this arrives on its own. In most groups it means chasing two or three people, one of whom flew three weeks ago and is now reconstructing the Hobbs reading from memory.
Reconcile fuel. Match receipts to flights, credit each partner what they spent. The single most time-consuming task, and the one most likely to be incomplete.
Calculate the bills. Meter delta times rate, minus fuel credits, plus the share of fixed dues, with reserve accrual split out. Straightforward maths, repeated per person, where a single slip generates a fortnight of email.
Issue statements. Send them. Ideally the same day every month.
Chase payment. The part nobody wants. Asking a friend for money is genuinely uncomfortable, which is why so many groups have quietly large outstanding balances.
Pay the bills. Hangar, insurance, the shop, subscriptions.
Update the reserve. Move the accruals, record any withdrawals, check the fund against hours remaining.
Answer the reserve question. Someone will ask. If the balance is not published, they will ask the treasurer, privately, and the treasurer will spend twenty minutes producing an answer that a single line on a statement would have given for free.
Annual tasks
- Rebuild the fixed-cost budget and reset dues — hangar and insurance both move every year
- Review the hourly rate against actual fuel prices and the reserve position
- Coordinate insurance renewal and get competing quotes
- Produce a year-end summary: what came in, what went out, what the fund holds
- Handle any joiners or leavers, including buyout arithmetic
Why it burns people out
Three reasons, and none of them is the volume of work.
It is invisible. Done well, it looks like nothing is happening. Nobody thanks anyone for a statement that arrived on time and was correct. The only visible output is a bill.
It is adversarial. The treasurer is the person who asks friends for money and tells them the rate is going up. That is a corrosive position to occupy indefinitely in a group whose whole point is friendship.
It is unbounded. Without a defined process, the job expands into "anything financial that is unclear," which includes everything nobody else wants to think about.
Most clubs that fail do not fail financially. They fail because the treasurer stops and nobody will take it on.
How to make it survivable
Write the role down. What the treasurer does, what they do not do, and what authority they have — particularly a spending limit below which they need nobody's permission. An undefined role becomes a limitless one.
Publish the numbers automatically. Reserve balance and account position visible to everyone, always, without anyone asking. This removes the single largest recurring interruption and, more importantly, removes the treasurer's status as the only person who knows.
Automate the arithmetic. Meter reading to itemised invoice should not be a monthly manual exercise. This is the bulk of the hours and it is entirely mechanical.
Make payment frictionless. A payment link on the statement collects far more, far faster, than a bank transfer someone has to remember. Most late payment is friction, not reluctance.
Set a term. Two years, then someone else. A defined end makes the job acceptable; an indefinite one makes it a trap. It also means at least two people understand the finances, which matters enormously the day the treasurer moves away.
The handover
The moment of maximum risk. A treasurer who leaves taking the knowledge with them can set a group back a year.
What the successor needs: access to every account, the reserve ledger with its full history, twelve months of statements, the current rate and dues basis with the workings, the insurance policy and renewal date, and a list of who owes what. If assembling that takes more than an hour, the group's records are in worse shape than it thinks — and the time to find out is now, not during the handover.