[Linux-aus] 2010 Treasurers report for Linux Australia

Wed Mar 23 11:41:02 EST 2011

Hello Anthony,

Thanks for your feedback.

On 23/03/11 02:16, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 22:04, Joshua Hesketh <josh at nitrotech.org 
> <mailto: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?

Andrew Ruthven is working on a breakdown for LCA2010 as he mentioned. 
I'm sure it'll be available soon.

>
> (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?)

At the time of doing the reports Wordcamp was mostly unreconciled. All 
of their transactions have been in the 1st Qtr of this year. Once the 
conference finishes wrapping up (I believe they are only waiting on the 
venue invoice) we will post through a summary of the event along with 
their profit&loss for the entire thing (likewise for DDU). They are 
currently set to make a profit of around $1.8k.

>
> 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)?

Most of LCA's expenses were incurred post event with no invoices sent 
until after the fact. While the team had a good idea of things like 
venue costs they didn't know the exact amounts (In this case all of the 
expenses changed dramatically with the rearrangement of venues due to 
the floods).

>
> Random queries:
>
>  - what's the "ATO clearing account" liability for?
This was set up by our accountants for paying out GST. That was the 
amount we owed the ATO at 31st of December, ie it is GST that we still 
owe, has been submitted in a BAS but not yet paid. Currently this 
account shows $0 as we have now paid these amounts to the ATO. The GST 
account is the amount of GST we billed during the last qtr, ie hasn't 
been included in a BAS as of 31st December (This has also since been 
submitted and cleared).

>  - what's with the "SUNDRY DO NOT USE" entries?
These were used to add sundry items from LCA2010. John Ferlito and I 
decided that we wanted to be a little more strict on account naming and 
have disallowed subcommittees to put things into this category (so we 
renamed it). It will ideally no longer be used in future years.

>  - what's the $9k server you apparently just paid for?

This is for equipment used at LCA2011. I'll look into the exact item and 
amend the category if appropriate before doing the proper/final 1st qtr 
reports next month.

>  - 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.

I will assess this for next year. The merchant account is part of Linux 
Australia's account, not LCA (which is why they fell there).

>  - $12k in grants over the year? really? (the l.o.a grants page only 
> documents $7900 in grants by my count)

Linux Australia gave $2,500USD to the Gnome Foundation for the Libre 
Graphics Meeting with the preference of flying an Australian or New 
Zealander to the event. This should probably be added to the grants page 
on the website.[0][1]

>  - what were the "travel" bits for (as opposed to grants/ghosts)? LCA 
> bid visits or something?

This was made up of bid visits, yes.

>  - 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?

You are correct that this is because we're holding non-AUD currency. It 
isn't against an area because of the way xero calculates it 
automatically we can't assign an area.

>
> 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)

Yes, all of 2010 was included. I've attached a month by month breakdown 
for LA's activities in 2010.

>
> $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?)

The Hobart storage is closed and the postage won't be reoccurring but we 
still have storage in Melbourne at ~615/qtr.

>
>     * $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.

Agreed. We ran very close to the interest earned and did a lot in 2010 
as a council. Clearly as we do more more overhead is incurred.

Thanks again, I hope this clears up your questions. Please let me know 
if you have any more queries.

Cheers,
Josh

[0] http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2010-April/018045.html
[1] http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2010-May/018107.html

>
> Cheers,
> aj
>
> -- 
> Anthony Towns <aj at erisian.com.au <mailto:aj at erisian.com.au>>
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