Annual General Meetings/2025/Treasurer's report

Detailed Reports

The fiscal year we legally must report on is 2024, i.e. from 01 Jan 2024 to 31 Dec 2024. See Official Financial Statement 2024.

The Foundation has made a big loss this year and this is, and should remain, be alarming. In particular for two reasons:

• At the end of last year it looked like it would be much better
• With adjusted tools we now forecast again a big loss for this year

To fix this I strongly encourage you to look into the details of the balance. If we bark up the wrong tree then we will not solve the crisis. You are free to come to different conclusions and to prompt the board and in particular me about that: I'm absolutely fallible, and the Foundation cannot afford to get it wrong again and again.

First of all, this year's preliminary balance looks again like if there will be a surplus. There is a profit of around GBP 38 000 on the bottom line. This is not real, as in particular income and to lesser extent expenses are distributed unevenly over the year.

I would like you to put the 2023 and 2024 numbers side by side. Please go to page 5 of the PDF, i.e. the page called "Page 3" on the bottom. Turnover has grown by 25 000 GBP, Cost of Sales has grown by almost 100 000 GBP, and Administrative Expenses also have grown by about 25 000 GBP.

So has the Foundation spent 100 000 GBP more than 2023? No. To understand that we have to look at page 10 of the PDF, i.e. the page marked "Page 8" on the bottom. This contains the breakdown of the numbers.

Cost of Sales contains the item Conference Costs which almost cancel out with the Conference Sponsorship in the Turnover group. With regard to Conference Registrations it is even a small surplus. It is legit to take Scholarship Costs into account here as well. In other words, a SotM has actually taken place in 2024, i.e. the one in Nairobi, and it has been essentially fiscally neutral or slightly in the red with around 7 000 GBP.

Another pair that cancels out are the Grants Received and Grants Issued. And the value for Contractors has even decreased for 2024 in comparison to 2023. What you see here: The Foundation has been very grateful for a huge one-time donation from a company. As this donation stretches out over parts of two fiscal years and for reasons rooted in British tax rules, the Grants Issued plus Contractors is the actual spending of the Foundation for Vector Tiles, iD maintenance, and some smaller projects.

Another zero-sum in both years are the Fiscal Sponsorships.

There will be a similar effect with the Grants Issued in this fiscal year as the money of the Sovereign Tech Fund is used to pay the Software Development Facilitator and the Software Developer himself. This is again almost cost neutral in the sense that a one-time donation is tied to an activity over limited time.

Everything else got rather more cost efficient than more expensive. The Operations Working Group is taking advantage of various sponsored services, and thus our operations costs are rather going down than up.

So the actual story is that:

• investment in development of OpenStreetMap resources has grown from about 40 000 GBP to about 90 000 GBP to get Vector Tiles and other things done
• this is intentional use of the one-time large extra fund from a corporate member, of which some money has been allocated for 2025
• huge donations from private people have plummeted amid small donations being relatively stable

Hence, the way forward is to discuss a sustainable fundraising strategy:

• The Foundation shall communicate to the community that this will be recurring by nature and they should plan accordingly
• The Foundation shall continue the track record of highly efficient and rather frugal spending
• The Foundation will consult with corporate members whether the rates shall be further adjusted. Note that we have raised the rates in 2023 by 50 percent, because it has been anticipated that there shall be higher income.
• Housekeeping of financial transparency is a must. This might get supported by symbolic cost cuts, but there is nothing substantial to save money.