There are three things I have learned about trustees from sitting on both sides of the table: as a general manager reporting to a board, as a trustee reading the papers, and as a consultant building resilient and financially sustainable organisations. The first is that most people join a board to play a strategic role in running the organisation. The second is that few of them enjoy conversations about policies, spend reports or risk registers. The third is that the best run organisations manage to blend strategic direction with detailed accountability.

A less-than-ideal charity board pack contains a set of management accounts, a variance against budget, a risk register that probably has something about AI and cash reserves on it, a chief executive’s report, and perhaps a few other ad hoc reports. Every one of these documents faces backwards. They tell you what happened, whether it matched what you expected, and why it fell short of, met or exceeded expectations. Trustees then spend ninety minutes asking questions, interrogating the officers and staff present, and suggesting some good ideas.

The best boards I have seen still do this, but it is a small part of the agenda. With the help of confident and capable chief executives and managers, they have put structures in place to ensure accuracy and timeliness, so that there are very few questions left to ask about what happened. Instead, they move the question to “what does this enable, hinder or stop us doing?”

My single most heavily weighted test of a strong board is whether it is supplied with a twelve-to-eighteen-month cashflow forecast. This one tool exposes operational spend, project spend, forecast project income, prospective grants and fundraising activity, projected wage changes and new hires, and the all-important reserves policy.

At its best, a cashflow forecast focuses the conversation on where energy needs to be spent. It moves the board from “we were rejected for that funding application, now what?” to “how many active applications do we have out right now?” It moves staff planning from a “what if” scenario to “we can afford that from next June, and only if such-and-such happens.” And it gives the board and leadership an immediate pulse check on the level of urgency and risk that should exist in the organisation. Cash rich and facing a team capacity issue? Perhaps a strategic investment in people is required. Cash poor and facing a team capacity issue? (That one feels more familiar.) Something is clearly broken and needs a serious shift.

I have seen boards armed with a forecast use it to cut piecemeal funding applications and over-engineered programmes, and to focus effort on structural change or a flagship bid. I have also seen boards confronted with a forecast for the first time and forced to look seriously at how they arrived at three months of cash and a dwindling pipeline. Both usually result in structural change of one kind or another. The job of the trustee is to make that a proactive choice rather than an unfortunate inevitability.

Cash remains key. Following the money in and out of the organisation, and what it does to the cash position in the months that follow, sharpens the “so what” of every decision. I encourage the boards I work with first to build a cashflow forecast, because it is still not common practice, and then to frame each decision by its effect on that forecast.

The final word goes to those who say that in a charity, particularly one focused on the arts, cash is not everything. They are right. It is not everything, but it is the necessary condition for delivering the work long into the future. That is why I also encourage an accompanying “impact forecast”: how many people will benefit from the charity’s programmes, business as usual activities and projects over the same period. It evens out the picture, and it can make the case for spending more cash than an organisation is comfortable with, because the impact is there in black and white. It also makes plain that when the cash hits zero, the impact hits zero too.

I’m looking forward to joining fellow trustees and sector leaders at the Arts & Business NI Governance Conference.