New Role Unlocked: Nursery Treasurer

I've taken on a new role recently, and for once it has nothing to do with code: I'm now the treasurer at my local nursery.

Getting there took a while. An enhanced DBS check is thorough by design, and thorough, it turns out, is also slow. There was a fair bit of waiting involved before I could actually start doing anything useful, which gave me plenty of time to wonder what I'd actually signed up for.

Last night was my first AGM. It was clear pretty quickly that there's been a difficult few months behind the scenes, some issues that the committee is now working through and improving. Nothing I need to go into here, but enough that I could feel the weight of it in the room. I'm walking into this at a point where things are already moving in the right direction, which is a better position than walking in cold.

It's a genuinely new kind of role for me. I've spent years signing off pull requests, not accounts, so there's a learning curve. But everyone on the committee was welcoming, and I'm hoping that a different professional background is exactly what's useful right now rather than a liability.

One thing I noticed straight away: some of the processes are still very manual. There's a new system coming in that should make gathering financial data easier, which is a good sign. But some of it still runs on Excel spreadsheets, doing the job but not doing it any favours. Nothing wrong with a spreadsheet, but there's clearly room to make the data easier to read, easier to add detail to, or maybe to build something a bit more bespoke, purpose-made instead of bent into shape.

I don't have a grand plan yet, it's one AGM in. But it's the kind of problem I know how to look at, and I'm looking forward to seeing where I can actually help.