Finances/Treasurer's Report for the December 2018 AGM
Treasurer's report for the December 2018 AGM
Please also consult:
- Income Q1-Q3 2018 PDF without annotations, preliminary
- Balance Sheet Q1-Q3 2018 PDF without annotations, preliminary
- Official Financial Statement 2017 (PDF as submitted to HMRC)
2017 Business Year
All figures are rounded.
In 2017, we received £13,000 from individual memberships and £67,000 from corporate memberships. We had donations of £48,000 (£19,000 of which were one large donation from the American Red Cross).
We have not run a funding drive in 2017.
Our total income in 2017, without SOTM, was £128,000 - almost the same as 2016.
Our main expenditures in 2017 were server operations (£11,500), freelance administration help (£8,200), insurance (£5,800), board travel and accommodation (£4,600), legal fees (£4,300), accountancy (£4,200), and bank charges (£2,700). We have written off or deprecated £29,000 in computer equipment - this is not money we actually spent, but it represents our servers losing value. We have also written off £2,700 in bad debts - corporate membership payments and outstanding sponsorship payments that were due from previous years but never paid. This is partly a consequence of how we handle corporate membership - when they expire we simply send corporate members a new invoice, and it can happen that they then decide they didn't want to renew after all.
Our total expenses, without SOTM, were £69,000, leaving us a surplus of £59,000 in the books for 2017.
- SotM 2017 in Aizu-Wakamatsu
The 2017 State of the Map in Aizu-Wakamatsu has spent £55,000 (half on scholarships, half on the rest of the conference), and earned £20,000 in ticket sales and £49,000 in sponsorships, yielding a £10,000 surplus after taxes. Our books show only £37,000 of sponsorship income and only £43,000 of expenses because some income and expense has been handled directly by the local team.
Our current assets - that's money either in our bank account or due to arrive there soon - have increased by £44,000 (from £193,000 to 237,000) over the course of 2017.
We have invested £40,000 in hardware in 2017, most notably one fully equipped database server for over £30,000. (Note that this money is not part of the "total expenses" figure listed above because buying servers isn't an expenditure, it's an investment.) At the same time, we have written off the aforementioned £29,000, hence our fixed assets - computers - have increased in value by £11,000 (from £43,000 to £54,000).
The 2017 finances have been audited by an independent volunteer auditor, Thomas Barris, whose report you can read here.
2018 business year
Accounting for 2018 is not complete yet. All numbers below are for the first three quarters (January through September) only.
The switch to a new accounting platform, "Xero", has brought some delays in publishing the quarterly figures as it took some time to get everything set up correctly, but we're now in a position where Xero works well for us.
- Large Bitcoin Donations
2018 started with a 2.64 Bitcoin donation from an unknown benefactor followed by a 18 Bitcoin donation from Pineapple Fund. We converted most of that to GBP but have held on to 3.0 BTC. Our total donation income from the Pineapple Fund is £146,000 plus 3.0 BTC. The exchange rates we got varied between £8,500 per BTC and £10,400 per BTC. Converting the BTC to GBP at the time was a very good idea; the exchange rate has (at the time of writing in December 2018) dropped to about £3,000 per BTC. I would like to specifically thank Grant Slater who managed the currency exchange.
The other donations, including the aforementioned 2.64 BTC which was exchanged, make up a total of £40,000. We also received a £4,600 grant from Google for our Summer of Code participation (part of which was disbursed for travel to their mentor summit).
We received £17,000 from individual and £71,000 from corporate memberships.
- SotM 2018 in Milan
SotM 2018 in Milan brought £104,000 in sponsorship and cost £66,000 (about 1/3 of this for scholarships), likely yielding a surplus of about £28,000 after taxes. Rob Nickerson from the SotM team commented that SotM income was pushed up by higher than expected sales of business tickets. I would like to specifically thank Rob for his stringent management of SotM finances. SotM is by far the biggest "cost center" in our books, and even a small mismanagement in this department could easily lead to us losing money. But under Rob's stewardship SotM was never something the treasurer had to worry about.
- Move to Amsterdam Data Centre
Total operations expenditure was about £22,000 which will increase to likely around £30,000 by the end of the year, almost half of which was spent in connection with the server move from Imperial College to Equinix in Amsterdam. In 2018, only replacement parts and upgrades for existing servers were bought - no new servers.
Other large cost items for 2018 (remember, just Q1-Q3) are about £10,000 for freelance administrative help, £8,000 for legal fees, £8,000 for insurance, £5,000 for board F2F and SotM participation, and £4,200 for accounting.
We had planned to do a funding drive in 2018, but with the large donations at the beginning of the year it would have looked a bit greedy to ask for even more money.
The budget for 2019 has not been set up yet. We are planning to keep the Pineapple Fund money separate and use it to fund the "microgrants" programme and potentially other non-core-business expenses.