The annual report

What your association is formally required to report depends on your state, your bylaws, and whether you hold funds in trust. Check those, or ask your attorney — this page is about the practical document a small board actually needs, which is usually broader than the legal minimum and considerably more useful.

What belongs in it

• Money in, by source. Plot sales, interment fees, dues, donations, and any income from invested funds. Separated, not totalled — a board cannot govern on one number.
• Money out, by category. Mowing and grounds, stone repair, insurance, utilities, administration.
• The balance, and what is restricted. Perpetual care funds are usually not yours to spend, and the report should make plain what is spendable and what is not. This is where small associations most often confuse themselves.
• The year's interments. How many, and who.
• Plots sold, and plots remaining. The second is the number that decides the cemetery's future and is almost never reported.
• Outstanding balances. What is owed, by how many accounts, and how old.
• Grounds and stone work done, and what is still needed.
• Events held — the cleanup, the walk, Decoration Day — with attendance and anything raised.

The two numbers boards ask for and rarely have

How many graves are left? Not how many acres — how many usable, unsold plots. Everything about the cemetery's next thirty years follows from it: whether to open a new section, what to charge, whether perpetual care is adequate.

What is perpetual care actually earning, against what mowing actually costs? A great many small cemetery associations are quietly losing that comparison and do not find out until the fund will not cover the season.

Why it takes a week

Not because it is hard. Because the numbers live in four places — a checkbook, a spreadsheet, a binder, and somebody's memory — and the week is spent reconciling them. The report is a symptom; the four places are the problem.

Where Sexton fits

Sexton keeps plot sales, dues, donations, perpetual care and the yearly ledger in the same file as the plots and the interments, so those numbers are one thing rather than four. Income, expenses and net are in plain view, and the year-end report prints on letter paper for the minute book — along with certificates of ownership, the interment register, an outstanding-balances list, and a wall map for the office.

Because the plots and the money are in one place, "how many graves are left" is a number you can read off the map rather than a question somebody has to go and count.