FC Progress Report Form A47
The A47 was a set of forms that struck fear into the heart of every forester and head forester as it was the laborious means by which the total expenditure and output of a forest unit was manually written out and forwarded to the District and Conservancy Offices. The individual form shown above is the summary part of the Progress report - Part 6 (VI).
The data was collected from worker’s time sheets (A6), forester’s timesheets, vehicle logs, forest harvesting records (U records) and such miscellaneous records such as planting and restocking (R1), fire reports etc.
Much of the expenditure data was recorded against a very comprehensive set of account numbers where each number referred to a specific operation or job such as ploughing for new planting, weeding the young trees, first thinning or harvesting road formation. The record of accounts was in itself a substantial volume and it did no harm to a forester to know his way around the tome.
Timesheets showing that week’s operations and also ‘lost time’ (Annual Holidays, public holidays, sick days, wet time and travel time accounts 1201, 1202, 1203 etc) were required for each worker. The hours against each job account for the whole week would be filled in by gangers, assistant foresters or foresters. It was then the clerical staff’s turn to calculate the total hours and cost against each account adding up to the workers full week’s earnings. Piecework was common practice and the quantity completed at the agreed price per unit was also worked out at this stage and the earned amount set against the hours worked on piecework (scrutiny was required to ensure that piecework earnings were not below time work earnings for the same period and also to ensure that there was no long term unusually high hourly earnings – a real point of contention!)
Weekly summaries of expenditure and quantities from the timesheets for the forest unit were completed on the appropriate forms by the clerical staff and foresters. From these, monthly and then quarterly summaries were laboriously written out and cross counted to ensure accuracy. The figures from the quarterly time sheet summaries provided the raw data for much of the Progress Report but data also had to be provided from vehicle logs, harvesting production forms, fire reports etc.
The full Progress Report consisted of Part 1 (Forest Management – Work on plantations from planting to thinning stage), Part 2 (Nurseries), Part 3 (Produce- Harvesting Operations), Part 4 (Miscellaneous), Part 5 (Roadwork – Roads, quarries, bridges etc) and Part 6. Part 6 summarised the Overhead and ‘Lost Time’ accounts in addition to providing a summary total for Parts 1 to 5 and hence the total expenditure for the forest unit.
Do you remember the period when Selective Employment Tax was levied on all employees who were not in a ‘production’ job or capacity?