Guest Post: You Don’t Have to Be an Accountant to Manage a Guild Bank

 Author: Matticus of WorldofMatticus.com

The guild bank continues to be a vital feature for the guilds of today. Just because bank features are offered does not mean that guilds are required to use them. However, used effectively, banks can help enhance the capabilities of guilds of all sizes.

Are you a new guild leader without an idea of how to set up a bank? We’ll discuss methods of income along with common expenditures that guilds face. Bank security is a big topic with the various scams going around and I’ll teach you some of the painful lessons I’ve had to learn throughout my first year as a GM when I had my guild bank broken into twice.

On the other hand, maybe you are ready to throw in the towel. We’ll talk about the right and wrong way of dismantling the bank.

What do I need a guild bank for?

The guild bank was introduced in patch 2.3 to help reduce player-made guild banks. You’ll find the vaults next to the normal player banks in major cities.

It’s designed to be a commons area for guilds to store stuff in. In days before the guild bank existed, guild leaders and officers had to create numerous alts and purchase bags as well as bank slots to hold all sorts of stuff that were beneficial to guilds. Some examples could be consumables like flasks or crafting materials like Frozen Orbs or recipes dropped. Your guild can store expensive items like bind-on-equip epics for later usage. Enchanting mats and Fish Feasts can be placed on the side ready to be withdrawn as they’re needed. It’s a simple matter of convenience (and in some cases, prestige especially when guilds advertise in trade that they’re looking for members and believe that advertising they have 2 bank tabs will help).

Pro tip: Are you forgetful like me when creating dozens of flasks or potions? I buy several stacks of Enchanted Vials and stick them in some of the vacancies in the guild bank tab.

Generating money

There’s a large variety of ways to create cash flow into the guild bank. As the GM, you’re in a unique position to decide which paths to pursue. Here’s some ways I’ve used in the past to pick up some gold for the bank.

• Selling BoEs: In raids, you’re invariably going to come to a point where no one in your guild is going to need BoE items. But there’s a whole market of fresh 80s that could use some gear to augment their characters. Put some of that needless stuff on the auction house. Northern Barrier sold well for us (several thousand gold) for new tanks.
• Sell recipes: Have an excess of recipes? If no one in the guild needs them, you may as well throw these up on the auction house too. You’ll find some mixed success with these based on your server population and economy. I’ve found plate recipes will sell real well while leatherworking bracers don’t. The recipe for Bejeweled Wizard’s Bracers is extremely popular as well.
• Sell trade goods: Enchanting mats and any extra epic gems you pull can be sold on the auction house. I managed to chip several thousands of gold into the bank by selling enchanting scrolls for Powerful Stats and Blood Draining. If your guild mates have extra Emblems they’re not using, they can use it to burn a few on select epic quality gems, have them cut (Bold Cardinal Ruby’s for example) and then listed on the auction house. Anything obtainable only in raids or purchasable via emblems are a plus (such as Crusader Orbs).
• Selling gear obtainable in raids: Admittedly, this technique will be limited to raiding guilds who have harder encounters on farm. This technique entails the raid inviting 1 or 2 players onto guild runs. The raid then goes and tackles the hard stuff while the purchasing players wait on the sideline in the raid. Either they contribute to the efforts of the guild or they simple die and wait until the boss falls over. No matter what happens, if the item drops, they can then purchase the item with the proceeds going towards the bank. The concept is similar to GDKP but it’s much more exclusive and the raid has more control. In the past, certain hard-to-get mounts were sold for around 10000+ gold due to their exclusivity and difficulty (The Twilight Drake from OS 3D on 25 is a good example).
• Tithe: Not exactly a form of taxation, but it requires guild members to voluntarily make donations into the bank. Maybe the bank offers select services such as subsidized enchants and consumables for raiders at the cost of a donation to the bank.

Of course, there are other methods of generating gold on an individual basis. Those profits can be diverted into the guild bank to help fund operations.

Guild expenses

Your guild bank isn’t generating any interest!

Resources and gold are there to be spent for the benefit of the guild. Don’t get caught in the trap of saving money for the future. Keep a reasonable amount of gold in the bank for emergency usage. The buffer depends on your guild and what you intend to do. For me, I try to keep the gold buffer around 15000 gold or so.

What do GMs buy in the name of their guild? You might find some of these items similar to the above.

• Specific gear: My guild has just reached Anub’arak on heroic 25 man. We’re in the middle of acquiring block rating and other avoidance gear for our tank. Inexorable Sabatons were on the list and is a BoE that can be purchased from the auction house. We picked it up for about 1000 gold. If an instrumental player has joined my guild and they need to get geared up to the point where they can be effective, I won’t hesitate in dipping into resources to help patch them up to raid readiness.
• Trade goods: We don’t have a lot of farmers in the guild. The ones that do farm do so only to sell their merchandise on the auction house. What I’ve offered to do is pay them the action house price -10% so I can get first crack at their Lich Bloom and Frost Lotus. With these, I can create flasks which the same players end up using anyway. Dream Shards are also a common item. We’re almost always out of Dream Shards and I end up making bulk purchases from the auction house to restore our supply.
• Guild repairs: We’ll discuss this more in depth later, but on progression nights, the repair bill can be pretty sizeable.

As you can see, these are just some of the ways GMs use the money they have access to in order to augment guild.

Bank tabs and their permissions

The amount of bank tabs your guild should purchase is dependent on the size of your guild and their purpose. Small (25 or so) to mid-sized guilds (50ish) can probably get away with 3 bank tabs at most. As your guild grows larger in scope, you’ll eventually want to invest in all bank tabs.

One creative way we came up with was we auctioned naming rights for different tabs. There was a mage in my guild invested 7500 gold just so he could immortalize the fact that he would “own the DPS meters”. I haven’t changed the name since.

You don’t necessarily have to fill all the tabs up. But, tabs can be configured individually in regards to who has access to them. The more tabs, the more flexibility you can set for item withdrawal permissions. You can set the first 3 tabs with a high amount of withdrawals. This would be suitable for stuff like Frostweave cloth that people can take and deposit if they needed. Some low level cooking items or low level potions could be included here so alts could benefit. In tabs 4 and 5, maybe you want the permissions to be tighter in regards to controls because it’ll contain select mats and consumables. The last tab could be suited for the really good stuff like epic recipes or items.

Managing the repair system

There is a button that allows players to repair using money taken directly from the guild bank. How much of it can be used can be controlled by you. You can disable the function entirely and force your raiders to pay for their own gold or turn off limits allowing them to repair as they see fit. A happy medium would be to impose a cap (say 50 gold) on the amount that can be used.

What’s a good amount?

In order to figure out how much gold should be allocated to guild repairs, it’s good to determine how much gold is actually being used for repairs. The best way to do that is do a comparison. Write down how much gold is in the bank at the start of the week. Flip on repairs during raid hours, then flip them off when there are no raids going on. At the end of the week, look at how much gold is left (after calculating for any deposits).

When I conducted this, my bank started off with 25000 gold. After a week, we were down to about 23300 (about 1700 gold in expenditures). That’s a lot of wipes. In the end, I decided that the guild rate of income would not be enough to match the guild repairs. Consequently, guild repairs are not offered.

The other alternative as mentioned before, it to impose a cap and to use guild funds to help soften the blow that wipes cause. One beauty of it is that different ranks can be set to withdraw different amounts. Since the plate wearers typically incur higher repair costs, it is possible set plate classes to a different rank which gives them access to more repair gold.

Setting the bank policy

For raiding guilds, it’s important to have a bank policy in place. Have the rules and ground work laid out to minimize any problems that might come later on. Your policy should answer the following questions:

• Who gets access to the bank?
• Which items should be stored where?
• What kind of items should be available for everyone to withdraw?
• How much should be withdrawn?
• How much gold should be allowed on a per day basis?
• Here’s an example of the one I use for my guild:

Bank Policy:

Tabs 1 and 2 are for public use. You can dump stuff in there that you don’t need or don’t want, other members are free to pull them out at will. This would be stuff like excess bandages, or cloth.

Tab 3 is used to store herbs and ore. They’re for raw mats used to convert into consumables or other raiding materials that are used.

Tab 4 is the vault. That’s where all the good stuff is. If there is something in there that you’d like, talk to me and I’ll see what I can do to release it for you. Recipes, enchanting mats, gems, and BoE epics will be stored here.

Tab 5 consists of a variety of flasks. Each stack of flasks have been split into 3. You are allowed 1 withdrawal per raid day. As each flash lasts an hour and our raiding hours are from 6 – 9 PM, it should last you the entire run. You’re expected to withdraw the flasks that are pertinent to your role (Tanking flasks for tanks, etc).

Tab 6 contains other consumables such as speed potions, Wild Magic potions, and Indestructible potions. You are allowed 2 withdrawals from here per raid day if you need them. If you need mana potions, full stacks are provided here in full. It is unlikely that you will use all of them during a single raid. They should last you several weeks at least.

Enchanting mats

If you are a main character who needs items enchanted for your main spec, the mats will be free of charge.

For alts or off spec enchants, you will need to make a purchase from the bank.

The prices for Dust, Cosmic Essences, Dream Shards and Abyss Crystals are 25% off the AH listed price. Given the choice between you buying from the auction house or from the guild bank, I’d prefer the latter. But that’s entirely up to you.

Mats will only be provided if the supplies are there.

Gems

Gems will be provided if they are available. Otherwise, that’s up to you. I’m sure some guildies have excess badges that they won’t mind spending.

Special materials

Craftable reagents like Crusader Orbs are going to be limited to just tanks who need their items crafted. The stronger they get, the easier time we’ll have. As soon as they’re finished with the gear they need, the list will open up to any raiders in the guild who wants to craft an item for use on their main. A forum thread will be used and orbs will be handed on a first come first serve basis.

Note that if you craft an item, you are expected to stretch out the usage for as long as possible. I will not be happy if we give you the mats to craft them only for you to express your desire to replace it with items that drops off a boss a week later.

Donations

The guild bank runs on donations and other methods to stay solvent. I ask that if you do use consumables for raiding that you deposit some gold in the bank. A typical flask on the auction house costs around 40 gold. For a stack of 3, an amount like 50 gold here and there is fine. You are free to deposit any amount you like. Those of you who are self sufficient and have the ability to sustain your own consumables do not have to use the bank to supply it (if you have your own, you don’t need to use the bank).

Repairs

Currently, repairs will not be offered for raiders unless otherwise specified by officers prior to the start of a raid.

Calling it a career

So you’ve decided that you’re finished with the game. No one seems to be interested in taking over the helm of the guild. There’s all these resources still remaining in the bank and you have no idea what to do with them.

The fair thing for you to do is to try and distribute the items as much as you can equally.

Gold

Split the gold equally among the players who contributed to the guild. There shouldn’t be any difficulties about this. It’s up to you to decide who deserves how much. Any vendor trash or old school items that no one wants should immediately be sold.

Raw mats

Split those up based on professions. Anything that can be specifically used by certain professions should be given to the players who practice them. You’ll have to eyeball the value and make the judgment call accordingly.

I remember when my old guild broke up during the tail end of Vanilla raiding, I received something like 9 Zul’gurub coins and assorted greens. I received a few dozen AQ scarabs that were used for reputation and item turn ins along with twilight texts and a variety pack of potions.

Remember, you’re the boss in charge and you get to set how the bank should be run! Don’t shy away from the responsibility. Used properly, the guild bank can be an incredible asset for your guild.