1. FIRST DRAFT Test Buddy Feedback: ‘This is a good spread sheet, it clear to see the income and outgoings for each month and the year, as well as the totals. It is easy to change the different membership fees to find the best one. However, the aim of the charity is to break even, so you could lower the fees even more. Also, you should add more features to make it user friendly: surplus/deficit and conditional formatting to make it clear to see if they have broken even or not for each month. You could also include an opening and closing cash flow for each month.’

2. FINAL DRAFT Feedback from Test Buddy: ‘This is a very good spreadsheet, the values for the membership fees are very reasonable and there is not too much of a surplus at the end. It is also easy to see whether there is a surplus or deficit due to the conditional formatting, which makes it much more user friendly. Feedback from another Test Buddy: ‘It is clearly laid out and you can see the income and outcome for each month. It is simple to use and easy to enter new values for them membership fees.

3. FORMULAE I used absolute referencing to copy the values from the spreadsheet given to my spreadsheet and so that I could copy the values across the months without them changing. This 3D referencing meant that it took less time and was more accurate and avoided mistakes while copying across values. I used the ‘SUM’ formula to add up the totals of each month and also the overall total. I used ‘IF’ statements for this row of cells to show whether there was a surplus or deficit (above or below zero) in each month more clearly. I used Conditional Formatting to change the Deficit cells to red and Surplus to green. This makes it easier to see the difference rather than reading off the numbers.

4. TESTING - 1 I tested my spreadsheet and formulae by entering all of the incomes and outcomes as zero in the original sheet. If this worked, it should have changed all the values in the improved spreadsheet to zero too and everything in the spreadsheet would be zero. This is what happened, which shows that the spreadsheet works.

5. TESTING - 2 To test my formulae even more I set the total silver memberships to 20 in the original spreadsheet, to give a total of £500 income overall. I then set the salary per month to £10, which should have given £120 for the year. The resulting cash flow should be £380, and the box should be green and surplus. This is what happened, showing that the formulae work for adding the total, multiplying the membership fees, working out surplus/ deficit and also the conditional formatting for the correct colours.

6. MEMBERSHIP FEES RESEARCH I did some research about existing membership fees of some other charities and organisations to compare the prices that they set and give me an idea of the fees that I could use. After doing this research I found out that membership options are usually whole numbers or intervals of 50p. This means that the fees are clearer rather than lots of decimals. I also saw that there is a large range of membership fees for adult membership, from £10 to £59 per year. The child membership fees that I found were usually around £10 or below, so I will try and use similar ones in my own membership fees. I made sure that the memberships that I used in research were charities and some to do with conservation and nature as this is the type of charity my membership fees are for.

7. MEMBERSHIP FEES - TRYING OUT NEW VALUES PROPOSAL 1 I used the values already given on the website, and found that there was a large deficit. PROPOSAL 2 I increased the values for all of the different membership options, as well as putting in fees for teen and kids options. There was still a deficit. PROPOSAL 3 I increased the fees for the two most popular options and decreased teen and kids options because they were not very realistic compared to other charities (see Organisations fees table). There was a large surplus. These are my final proposed membership fees for the next year for the charity. I decreased the ‘Silver’ membership option because it was too similar to Gold and also slightly decreased the platinum price. I kept the numbers realistic (i.e. not many decimal places, as shown in research) and there was a surplus of £21, enough for the charity to break even. These final figures are also similar to my research.