It isn't my most favourite thing to do... but after a concert weekend for our ensemble, there is a whole batch of things that need to be done. Mostly financial and other administration, plus thank you emails and updating of post concert website and publicity... and usually it is pretty quick, I can get the bulk of it done in a couple of days of concentrated work in the gaps between other things...

However, this time... it was complicated by a few things...

The biggest thing being that both my wife and I moved immediately onto other projects for other people/organisations... and then we also have three other ensemble projects incoming that needed more immediate attention... a small regional coast tour, an outreach project, and then the next main chamber ensemble concert. All of these needed the pre-concert preparation in programming, rehearsal planning, and publicity... none of which could wait, whilst the post concert wrapping could wait a bit.. aside from the musician payments and thank-you emails...

Then the other complication was that this last concert occurred just after the financial reporting year, which meant that a new year's of accounting stuff needed to be set up before entering it all in... nothing big, just another complication.

But the largest complication to finishing up the wrap... and getting it out of my head... well, we had two grants for this project, one from a philanthropic organisation and another from a government arts department... and these grants needed to be properly acquitted... Luckily, I'm pretty organised with the administration and financial side of things, so a good chunk of that is easy to do... but there is the words that you have to write about how it was successful (or not...), and all of that sort of thing... and that takes a moment to think about before writing it up.

And at those times, I'm so thankful that I've had a good deal experience in writing almost every day for the past few years on Hive... it does make writing these things a lot easier, even if my grants aren't quite as formal and jam-packed with meaningless buzzwords as most grant applications seem to be!

... and that leads me to my major gripe about arts organisations and their grant applications... what they say, and what the agencies think they do.... well, in reality is not quite what they use the money for. It irritates me, because it seems like the larger the organisatiion, the less honest they are about that... but they cover it up with fine words and pretty photos.

But all that aside, the grant acquittal is done, the ensemble admin is done, and I'm just waiting on two more invoices from musicians so that I can complete the financial side! Now to dive headlong into the upcoming projects without the past concert stuff still hanging over me...

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