[Linux-aus] 2010 Treasurers report for Linux Australia

[Anthony Towns]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 22:04, Joshua Hesketh <josh at nitrotech.org> wrote:

> Please find attached a copy of the 2010 Treasurers report for Linux
> Australia.
>

Great, thanks!

At first glance, it looks good. GST owing looks right. It would probably be
good to have a clearer indication what figures include GST (or don't) -- I
guess the registration amounts are what was collected ex-GST, eg? DDU FY
summary looked odd, but obviously that's only because the expenses didn't
happen 'til this year. Conferences look to be on the order of:

    LCA: $400k budget? $50k profit?
    PyCon AU: $42k budget, $7k profit
    Drupal Down Under: $40k budget, $5k profit?

That seems like it's about right to me. It would obviously be nice to have a
summary of LCA2010 other than just "$85k profit" -- any chance of that?

(There doesn't seem to have been a break out for Wordcamp? Or is that what's
actually happening under the PyCon AU title? Or did it not do anything
financial in 2010, and just not get a Jan-Mar summary like some of the
others?)

Reporting unclaimed reimbursements as a liability is fantastic. Any chance
of tracking unpaid expenses too (eg, LCA2011 knew they'd have to pay $x,000
for their venue in december, which could have been subtracted from their
profit for a more accurate idea of what's going on)?

Random queries:

 - what's the "ATO clearing account" liability for?
 - what's with the "SUNDRY DO NOT USE" entries?
 - what's the $9k server you apparently just paid for?
 - wrt the $2k in bank fees -- in the past I've matched these up against
what they were payments for (ie, lca registrations) so they come out of the
LCA line rather than the LA one. I think that's better, ymmv.
 - $12k in grants over the year? really? (the l.o.a grants page only
documents $7900 in grants by my count)
 - what were the "travel" bits for (as opposed to grants/ghosts)? LCA bid
visits or something?
 - any reason the foreign currency bit is not part of LA? It's just as much
an overhead/income source as bank fees/interest afaics. I assume it's just
an ongoing tracking thing given you're holding some non-AUD currency?

Hmm. Any reason there isn't a month-by-month break down of the LA
activities? (Have transactions from Jan-Mar 2010 actually been included? I
can't actually tell for sure from what I see, I think)

$35k in LA expenses is a lot of money -- it's pretty much the entire cost of
a Drupal Down Under or a PyCon it seems. It's apparently made up of:

$12k - Community projects (grants, etc):

    * $12k grants

$7.5k - Storage stuff: (I gather this has all been given away now so isn't
recurring?)

    * $2.6k postage/freight
    * $5k non-LCA storage

$7k - Administrative overhead:

    * $5k meetings
    * $1k office expenses
    * $500 accounting fees
    * $200 subscriptions/telephone

$6k - Stuff needed for profitable projects:

    * $2k merchant fees (blame LCA)
    * $4k insurance (needed for LCA, DDU, LUGs, SFD ...)

$2.5k - Stuff I don't understand:

    * $1.6k non-f2f LA travel (??)
    * $1k non-LCA ghosts costs (??)
    * $250 non-f2f/ghosts/LCA food/drink (??)

Personally, I think it''s useful to break out the "administrative overhead"
and "actually doing cool stuff" (so grants, probably some of the travel?)
into separate areas (like DDU/PyCon are separate areas).

If you do that, it comes to $18k useful, and $17k overhead, of which $7.5k
of the overhead is storage crap, $5k is meetings, and $2.5k is stuff I
couldn't figure out.

Those numbers compare to $9k total worth of interest received over the
course of the year.

So separating out the "useful" stuff and killing off the storage stuff
brings the LA stuff down to about break even that way ($9.5k overhead/weird
versus $9k interest). That seems like a useful metric to me.

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at erisian.com.au>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/attachments/20110323/f8c6f46a/attachment.htm