Annual General Meetings/2024/Treasurer's report

Detailed Reports

The fiscal year we legally must report on is 2023, i.e. from 01 Jan 2023 to 31 Dec 2023. See Official Financial Statement 2023.

Like in the previous year, I would like to remind you of two caveats:

Both engaging contractors and employing people is reflected as Administrative Expenses, although these expenses constitute our actual business and only to a small part overhead.

When we buy servers or similar hardware in use for multiple years then this is sum-zero in the accounts above - our cash assets go down as much as our fixed assets go up. Instead, over the useful lifetime of the hardware the depreciation grows annually until it matches the initial cost of the piece of hardware. When we dispose of the hardware, this amount is subtracted from both depreciation and fixed assets.

In other words: if you would like to know whether the organisation is still actionable then you should watch the "Cash at bank".

We have a small surplus for 2023. First of all, I would like to thank all the donors, individual one as well as from corporations. These donations have meant that we can replenish the reserves we now need to pay our SRE, development of the iD editor software, and some other useful expenses for actual OpenStreetMap business.

As part of getting serious on working with a budget, the board has moved the elections and the AGM such that the new board has a realistic chance to set up a budget for 2025 before that year starts. The upside of this is that the report for 2023 comes less late, the downside is that the preliminary Profit and Loss 2024 and the preliminary Balance Sheet 2024 bear rather little information. There is not only economic activity for October to December missing, but also outstanding payments. In particular corporate membership fees are distributed unevenly over the year, but there is also some work open to ensure that membership fees are actually paid.

The donations drive for the 20th birthday of OpenStreetMap has yielded far less than the donations drive of 2023. It might be necessary to run another donations drive towards the end of the year to keep the reserves at a level of one year.