YORKSHIRE have announced a post-tax deficit of £118,000 in their financial results for 2012, an improvement of more than £300,000 from the previous year.

The White Rose, who lost £460,000 in 2011 and hold their AGM at Headingley later this month, have also generated a turnover of £7.8m – an improvement from £5.4m.

They also reported an operational surplus of £1.2m compared to £393,000 in 2011, mainly due to the return of Test cricket to Headingley in the form of England versus South Africa last August.

Yorkshire, whose last Test before that was the neutral Test between Pakistan and Australia in 2010, have described their trading position as “very healthy”.

They have also said they would have returned a surplus had it not been for “some one-off expenditure, the impacts of the Olympics on Test match corporate hospitality sales and lost gate receipts from the unprecedented weather, which saw 37 percent of playable overs lost to rain, and the abandonment of the ODI”.

But, on the other hand, they were helped by promotion back to the LV= County Championship’s top-flight and their successful run in Twenty20, which brought unbudgeted income from both a home quarter-final and qualification for the group stages of the Champions League.

Meanwhile, Colin Graves is set to become the England and Wales Cricket Board’s new deputy chairman.

The White Rose county’s executive chairman has beaten Essex’s Nigel Hilliard in a ballot of the chairman of the first-class counties and the MCC by ten votes to seven with two abstentions.

His name will now be put to the ECB’s 41 members for election.