[Linux-aus] Treasurers Report 2012

[Joshua Hesketh]

On 25/01/13 23:42, Anthony Towns wrote:
> 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?

Could be. I believe this is the more technical term as it is what the
auditor used.

>
>>  - 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?

Most of it, yes. There was a few early sales for various reasons
relating to personal requests.
>
> I would have thought that all of that would come under the "Prepaid
> conference fees" liability?

Yes it could. A negative asset is as good as a liability. However this
is the journal entry we were advised to enter so that's how we accounted
for it.

>
>>  - 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?

Not a bad idea. However the 2011 actuals will never be aligned due to
the change in finanical year. I will suggest the next treasurer does a
2012 actuals update next year though.

>
>>  - 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?

That budget is only an overview of how LA operates. Each subcommittee
manage their own budgets that contain such information as this. Their
information is described within the P&L and the additional spreadsheet I
sent through but perhaps we should ask each subcommittee to provide a
public budget with a "neat" breakdown in the future. I might leave this
to the new treasurer to manage if they see fit.

However to give you an idea of how the subcommittees operate we ask each
of them to at least break even with no sponsorship. So any profit is
really the actuals. What happens in reality (and this is how we ask the
subcommittees to work) is that as they get sponsorship on board for
their event they can start adding things back in. For example, without
sponsorship an event may not have any video recordings or morning tea.
But once they get a few names signed on they can afford to do it. The
only exception to this is LCA which we ask to turn a profit to cover
what is more or less the management budget I sent through.

>
>> 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?

Well $7.5k is, yes. The Drupal community have been a part of Linux
Australia for the last few years and being an open source conference
with such clear outcomes this was an easy decision.

As for the charity donation I have not discussed with the LCA team the
logistics of what we will pledge.

This bucket should be for doing things such as sponsoring the Ada
Initiative, helping SFD teams, giving hackerspaces grants, flying people
to cool conferences, sponsoring a floss speaker to a non floss event,
collaborating and supporting other open technology organisations etc.
It's hard to be specific with this item because our goals as so broad
and the activities change.
>
>>  - 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.
Ah yes, I see. The actuals take a bit of a slip due to 2011 events
having outstanding expenses. The amount added up in the budget table is
only the amounts listed there. This therefore is only adding up the
expenses and profit from the items listed. There are other expenses that
LA incurs that could be considered sundry that are not in our general
budget. The general budget is the expenses we expect so the difference
you are referring to should probably be listed as "unexpected expenses"
etc. I hope that makes sense?

Basically when in doubt, refer to the P&L. That budget is only for being
an interesting overview as you mentioned.

>
>> 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.

Cheers :-)

>
>> 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.

Yep, we could do this with extra categories within Xero but I think it
gets tricky. It's not very difficult to pull the information from the
P&L and put it in that document or to construct a comparison table as
seen in the extra spreadsheet I gave you (< 2min). Perhaps the treasurer
should be posting that to the list quarterly. Something to think about
next term anyway.

My apologies if I'm missed something or made little sense. It's getting
late and there's so much to do!

Cheers,
Josh

>
> Cheers,
> aj
>


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