On Thu, 2010-12-23 at 10:15 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi Germán,
>
> First thanks for publishing the budget, good to see it at last!
>
> Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote:
> > The documents attached are:
> > - Summary of the budget.
> > - Spreadsheet (ODF and Gnumeric) with the details consolidated.
>
> Are you looking for feedback? You don't say whether this is a draft or a
> final budget, or whether you're hoping for comments.
Feedback is welcomed.
> My initial reaction is that I'm missing something like a balance sheet,
> showing how much we're starting off with in each category. For example,
> I know that we have already received $50,000 for mobile, so the
> expenditure on mobile is spending funds we have already set aside, but
> that's not clear from the budget.
At this moment you can compare it against what we had until September
16th. See "Final Budget" under 2010 at
http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/FinancialStatus
We did not spend all our projected budget for 2010, such as $30,000 on
Women's Outreach or $50,000 on Mobile.
> In every other field where expenditure outweighs income, I am not
> familiar with any money carried forward there might be. For example, the
> $10,000 shortfall in accessibility - is this dependent on future
> fundraising, spending funds carried over, or an investment which the
> foundation board are consciously making from cash reserves? Same
> question for the $27,000 shortfall for women's outreach, the $30,000
> shortfall in hackfests and the $12,000 expenditure on marketing.
For income, we are conservative to avoid big surprises. For expenses, we
are a bit liberal with the numbers to try to cover any unexpected raise
in the costs. However, when we run the budget we try to be wise in how
we spend our funds. And we try to get funds to cover all the planned
activities.
For instance, if you compare the budget for hackfests in the last year,
you will notice we expected $14,000 in income and $35,000 in expenses
(for 4 hackfests). However, hackfests were a success and we had around
9 hackfests whose costs were $38,460. At the same time, companies were
very supportive with us ($35,925). Now, we had the experience of the
previous year and we can estimate better on this matter.
With a plan we can ask for sponsors, but we can not count them until we
are sure. That said, we expect to get sponsors for the activities
planned, but if we do not get them we would use our cash reserves. For
unplanned activities, we would evaluate them case by case.
FWIW, when I talked with the a11y team, they provided me a sound plan
for 2011 and 2012. I would expect to make it public sooner than later,
as a complement of the general budget.
For Marketing and Women's Outreach, we did not spend the funds on 2010.
And there are plans for both of them.
I am all for supporting good plans.
> In general, it would be good to know in the budget summary which
> expenditures are unconditional, and which are conditional on fundraising
> (either through FoG or through targeted fundraising for an event or a
> program).
In the spreadsheet there are comments in some cells, for instance, a
campaign to buy a new server on March.
I would say all our expenditures are unconditional wrt to getting new
funds. The deficit in the balance is covered with the surplus of 2010
(look at the tab 'Real' in the final 2010 budget).
I have not added the balance sheet because I would like to add accurate
numbers there. For that purpose I need to cross check more things. Feel
free to ping me about it (please, not before mid January :-).
--
Germán Póo-Caamaño
http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/
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