It's around this time of year that the financial pages of most newspapers carry articles crammed with advice on how to either get out of debt or handle your finances better.

Maybe some of these articles should be forwarded to those controlling the purse strings down Harry Potts Way.

Talk to most Burnley supporters about the financial situation of the club and they will profess puzzlement. Put simply, the numbers do not appear to add up.

Last season, Burnley sold Richard Chaplow and Robbie Blake, making in excess of £2million from the deals. They also reaped the financial benefits from good runs in both the Carling and F.A. Cups, particularly from the latter, with the games against Liverpool and Blackburn Rovers being televised.

The club got a further boost with the departures of Tony Grant and Ian Moore, reputed to be the last of the big earners at the club, netting £50K for the latter into the bargain.

As the 2004/05 season drew to a close, we were told on a regular basis by the club that in order to break even, somewhere in the region of 8,500 season tickets would need to be sold. This was achieved. So on the face of it, the club was on a decent financial footing.

Or was it? Perhaps the alarm bells should have started ringing when Steve Cotterill spent less than £300K on transfer fees over the summer. If we couldn't spend after the season we'd just had, then when could we?

Then, a little over a month ago, prior to the AGM, the club revealed it needed an average attendance around the 16,000 mark in order to break even, as they were losing £20K a week - or put another way, a touch over £1million a year.

Understandably, this came as something of a shock to those supporters who, just a few months earlier, had been told the club's break-even target was the sale of 8,500 season tickets.

Granted, the Turf Moor pitch was relayed and refurbishment work was undertaken at Gawthorpe over the summer, but surely this would have been factored into any financial projections the club would have made?

Now we are told that it's unlikely that any new faces will be arriving at Turf Moor during the transfer window.

How has it come to this? How have we reached a situation where we were breaking even in the summer, yet now find ourselves losing money hand over fist?