[Linux-aus] Treasurers Report 2012

[Anthony Towns]

On 25 January 2013 20:57, Joshua Hesketh <josh at nitrotech.org> wrote:
> The real reason here is that it is moved into pre-payments for the 2013
> financial period. So the 2013 conference will show up in the 2013 report.

Maybe that column could be "Future events" or similar then?

>  - What's with "Accounts receivable preinvoiced" ?
> This would be the LCA2013 sales marked a presales.

LCA2013 regos hadn't opened until Oct 3rd or something, so don't
appear on that report, right? Is that sponsorship then?

I would have thought that all of that would come under the "Prepaid
conference fees" liability?

>  - PyCon had a $3k loss (for 2011) against the $6k gain (for 2012);
> probably should be mentioned against the budget? (Pycon 2011 was $22k
> gain last year, $15k above budget though)
> Yes this would have been remaining expenses not in the 2011 budget. You can
> look at both of the budgets for comparison, but I also have a spreadsheet
> attached that does a nice comparison of all the areas.

Shouldn't there be updated "actuals" for the LA 2011 budget published
if that's the way it's getting counted then?

>  - BCM (Bar Camp Melbourne?) and JDM (Joomla Day Melbourne?) aren't on
> the budget for 2013? should they be?
> I'm unaware of solid plans for 2013. These conference currently run on a
> 'break even' budget.

Hmm. I wonder if that gives the best picture of what's going on? Maybe
it would make sense to summarise the budgets for the conferences more
like:

   -$1,000 BarCamp Broome:
        +10,000 - sponsorship
        +4,000 - regos
        - 15,000 - expenses

to get both some idea of the expected bottom line and some idea of the
size of the event / potential risk?

> Linux Australia has the money to be doing more for the open source
> community.

Amen.

> However, we have already donated $7,500 in sponsorship to
> DrupalCon Sydney

> along with formalising a new regional delegates programme.

> Previously the donations to charities (such as the Floods/Devil foundation
> etc) comes out of here. Last year we only matched $7.5k in donations rather
> than $10k max that we had been doing.

So that seems like $15k-$20k of the total $30k is already spent or committed?

>  - looks like the total budget figures differ from actual by ($2700)
> in 2011 (some income missed?), and by $8700 in 2012 (PyCon and
> Wordcamp as mentioned above account for some of that, though there's
> BCM and JDM too...)
> Not sure I follow you here. Could you please be more specific of which part
> of the document you are looking at/summing?

The summary figures for "actual" in the 2012 budget are $45,133 in
expenses and $133,672 in conference return. That's $88,539 net profit
according to the budget actuals; compared to $79,796 in the profit and
loss bottom line for total profit and loss, which means the budget
actuals are missing $88,539-$79,796 = $8,743 in additional losses or
less expenses etc. That might be a accounted for with a line item for
"corrections to LA 2011 budget actuals" eg.

> Yes it is done by hand. We don't follow the budget to the number so long as
> we are abiding by our expense policy (

Sure. I think that budget summary is excellent -- it's almost all the
information that's actually interesting, and it's short enough to
actually be understandable unlike a full P&L/balance sheet/etc.

> http://www.linux.org.au/policies/expense) so I tend to only add it up a few
> times in the year to make sure we are being sensible (mostly I just keep an
> eye on xero). Yes, we can use xero for budgeting but this requires us to
> budget against each of the accounts (as listed per the P&L).

Yeah, I don't think that would be as valuable; I'm more thinking it
would be nice to just pull out the information you've got there except
automatically so that (a) the council can see how spending's going at
any meeting; and (b) so members can see how LA's projects are doing
financially once a quarter, say, without three month's delay for
auditing, etc. I would have thought pulling the numbers up from the
column totals on the P&L or something might be workable as a start, or
maybe some scripting/scraping might get the rest of the way.

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at erisian.com.au>