PARTICKThistle's second successive relegation coincided with the club's first significant loss in years last season.
However, deep cost-cutting, including the dismantling of the Firhill youth squad and the departure of chief executive Alan Dick, enabled the club to retain a small full-time squad.
Thistle are keen to win promotion from the First Division at the first attempt, and the club is benefiting from its financial prudence in past campaigns.
However, director Tom Hughes warned that this will be reviewed if the club does not bounce back.
"We are benefiting from our good husbandry at the moment, but that can't go on indefinitely, " he said yesterday.
In its newly-published accounts, Partick reports that its status as a "going concern" is dependent on continuing support from its bankers.
The Jags, who narrowly avoided extinction in 1997 amid losses of GBP10,000 a week, operated at around breakeven afterwinning promotion to the Bank of Scotland Premier League in 2002.
In season 2003-04, which saw the club relegated in controversial circumstances, Thistle posted a net profit of GBP28,000, cash which it used to repay bank loans.
Last term's equally ill-fated Division One campaign saw the club post a pre-tax loss of GBP338,124 for the year to May 31. The deficit would have been far worse but for a GBP250,000 parachute payment from the SPL. Partick also benefited from a cash injection of GBP80,000 from European governing body Uefa, in the form of a solidarity payment reflecting past good performances by Celtic and Rangers in European competition.
Partick's full-time squad has been cut by half to around 20 players and an already modest wage bill pared still further.
Last season the Jags paid just GBP1m to a staff roster numbering 44 players and 15 support staff - equivalent to under GBP17,000 per employee. This was 20-per cent less than in 2003-04.
Partick's net debt edged up 2-per cent in 2004-05 to GBP950,000.
Hughes said Partick remains embroiled in a legal dispute with former manager Gerry Collins over allegedly defamatory comments made by Hughes about Collins in a Daily Record article.
Partick said it is confident no liability will arise from that claim.
FACT FILE
2005 2004
TURNOVER n/a n/a
PRE-TAX LOSS GBP338,124 (GBP27,742)
DIVIDEND nil nil
Full-year figures
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