Finances/Treasurer's Report for the December 2016 AGM

From OpenStreetMap Foundation


Treasurer's report for the December 2015 AGM

Please also consult:

2015 Business Year

All figures are rounded.

In 2015, we received £7,800 from individual memberships and £15,000 from corporate memberships. We had regular donations of £15,000 and in addition to that received £58,000 in donations from a server donation drive.

There was no SotM conference in 2015 (the big conference in New York was the SotM-US and did neither cost nor earn the OSMF anything).

Our total income in 2015 was £97,500.

Our main expenditure in 2015 was for server operations (£11,000), accountancy (£6,000), travel and accommodation for board meetings (£5,000), insurance (£4,000), various legal and professional fees (£3,000) and bank charges (£3,000). We have written off or deprecated £28,000 in computer equipment - this is not money we actually spent, but it represents our servers losing value. We have also written off £3,500 in bad debts - sponsorship money that was promised during the last two SotM conferences but has never appeared in our bank account and where we lacked the paperwork to actually enforce payment.

Our total expenses were £64,000, leaving us a surplus of £33,500 in the books 2015.

Our current assets - that's money either in our bank account or due to arrive there soon - have increased by £41,000 (from £76,500 to £117,500) over the course of 2015. This is mainly due to us earning a lot of money through the hardware funding drive, but not spending nearly that much money on hardware yet. We only invested £18,500 in hardware in 2015 - 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.

2016 Business Year

The two major finance-relevant events in 2016 were the State of the Map conference in Brussels, and the funding drive that we have run.

The State of the Map conference numbers aren't fully done yet but is currently looks like it has cost about £60,000 and brought in about £90,000 which means a rather unexpected surplus in the order of £30,000 (minus £6,000 in tax); we had budgeted SotM to wrap up with a "black zero". Well done, SotM team!

Income from individual membership in the first three quarters was £6,000, and corporate membership brought in £7,000. The corporate membership situation hasn't changed much compared to the same period in the previous year, however with the announcement of the membership scheme we're seeing interest picking up in the last quarter and we hope that we'll end up with more than £20,000 in corporate membership income in 2016.

In the first three quarters, we had regular donations of only £6,000, but the donation drive has brought in almost £60,000 in addition to that (part of which came in only in the 4th quarter). For the first time in this donation drive, we made specific efforts to reach out to "end users" of our data and ask them for help in running the project they all use.

On the expense side, in the first three quarters of 2016, we've spent £12,000 on hosting, £11,000 on legal fees, £7,500 on insurance, £3,000 on accounting, and £3,000 on an in-person board meeting in Amsterdam. The legal fees were mainly related to the extension of our trademark registration to more countries.

We've also spent roughly £35,000 on hardware in the first three quarters.

Outlook

We'll definitely end this year with a solid plus, not only because of the unexpected income from SotM but also because of the successful donation campaign. However, having a little money in the bank is critical for an organisation like ours - we must have some reserves to cover for unexpected events. We could suddenly find ourselves at the receiving end of legal threats, or we could face a sudden major hardware defect, or we could have an income shortfall when running an expensive event like SotM. It is good to know that the organisation wouldn't immediately keel over if something happens.

We will attempt to further increase the regular income through corporate memberships, but we are also planning to keep running a donation drive every year in order to avoid becoming dependent on one source of income alone.

It is also worth noting that we expect to spend roughly £12,000 per year on freelance admin assistant services. This has started only in September 2016 and hence doesn't feature prominently in the above numbers yet.

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