DebConf11/Accounting

This describes how DebConf11 money is managed. This document describes tracking actual transactions, not budgeting future expenses.

A summary of transactions is LINK_HERE, there is summary of account balances.

Summary

• Richard is trying to keep track of money well this conference.

• There are two distinct parts: budgeting (predicted future transactions) and the accounting of those transactions once they happen.
  • Since DebConf is so chaotic, richard is trying to use a pragmatic approach: make the best budget possible (budget.ods), but realize this will be out of date and inaccurate in the end.
  • Have a separate accounting ledger (ledger-dc11), record only what actually happens. Trying to record all predictions in the ledger doesn't make sense when things change so much.
• budget.ods in debconf-data lists predictions of expenses, before the conference.
  • budget.ods has only estimated total expenses in it.
• ledger-dc11` and ledger-dc11-onsite are the ledgers. This records actual money movement by transaction.
  • http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debconf-data/dc11/ledger-dc11?view=markup
  • This is where you look to find incomes, in "incomes" account.
  • You can also find actual/past expenses and location of assets.
  • These are in `apt-cache show ledger` format.
  • After the conference, ledger-dc11 should be our actual conference budget. By this time, budget.ods will probably be out of date.
  • ledger-dc11 should be reconcilable with our bank statements to verify we haven't missed anything.
  • Sponsor pledges are recorded in "assets:receivable" - Sponsor pledges are considered firm enough to be included, since there is an invoice and exact amount agreed upon.
  • Actual money we have so far is in "assets:ffis|spi".
  • ledger-dc11 is *public*, in debconf-data. As such, the transaction descriptions there should not include sponsor or attendee names. This may make tracking a little bit harder, but richard considers the transparency worth the extra effort. The sponsor and attendee details are in two spreadsheets listed below.
    • • sponsor-payments.ods in debconf-team tracks sponsor pledges pay payments. This is a private document, listing pledges, and what has arrived in our bank accounts and not. It is fast to check this spreadsheet against the "incomes:sponsor" account in the ledger.
      • attendee-payments.ods in debconf-team tracks what attendees have paid and not. There are scripts which parse this and correlate with Pentabarf data for use by the registration team. It is fast to check this spreadsheet against the "incomes:attendee" account in the ledger.
• You can view running balances here: http://rkd.zgib.net/http/debconf/accounting-balances.txt (global + onsite).
  • "assets" lists what we have in our bank accounts, or sponsor money receivable
  • "expenses" lists what we have actually spent money on so far
  • "incomes" lists where our money has come from (negative of it). This includes sponsor money pledged but not yet received, but no other money "promised" like attendee fees.
  • "liabilities" tracks which reimbursements we need to make to people
• Why the asymmetry between income and expense tracking? I only track incomes we are _sure_ of, so they can go into a ledger directly. Expenses, on the other hand, we want to track what they __could__, so it goes into the budget spreadsheet.
• Are we using cash or accrual accounting? Basically, accrual (with respect to sponsorship and invoices), except richard is very conservative with judging when events happen. For example, attendee payments are not considered income until they hit our banks - since many professional registrants just register accidentally and never intend to pay. Similarly, other expenses are considered when money actually moves, not when it is authorized, since this is DebConf and we can't plan that far in advance.

On-site money tracking plan

Someone on-site can fill this in with what you all want to do.

• Whenever anyone spends money (that is, money actually changes hands), mail richard (lists are OK) this information with "budget" in the subject:
  • Date of transaction
  • How much money, down to decimal places (remember, this is actual transactions, not predictions.) (and currency if ambiguous).
  • What was the money for? (example: "badges and paper")
  • Money went from who to who? (examples: "my own money, to be reimbursed" or "from DIVA debit card" or "diva giving cash to $person for reimbursement")
• Here is the on-site ledger: http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debconf-data/dc11/ledger-dc11-onsite?view=markup

How it works

This section isn't important except if you want to join the accounting team.

The ledger is a double-entry general ledger. It can be examined with the `ledger` program (in Debian) or `hledger` program (not in Debian yet). These programs can generate all types of useful reports, and are scripted to do so at the links above. The `ledger` manual, in particular, is a good introduction to double-entry accounting. It is designed to be public. If you want to add something to it, here are sample entries:

 2011/03/19 Name tags
     expenses:misc        $+150
     assets:spi           $-150

 2011/03/19 SPI->FFIS transfer
     assets:spi            -$1000
     assets:ffis              790 EUR
     expenses:exchange fee    $10

`hledger add` provides a nice tab-completing interface to appending new transactions. Note that euros are "EUR", not "€", due to a unicode bug in some vty library.

The attendee payments and sponsor payments are kept as sub-accounts in spreadsheets. This allows the ledger itself to be public. Occasionally, the `income:attendee` and `income:sponsors` accounts are updated in the ledger from the spreadsheets.

For a list of the accounts, see LINK_HERE.

This section will be updated with more information as procedures are developed.

List of accounts

Proposed accounts it would be useful to classify into

income:sponsor
income:attendee:prof
income:attendee:corp
income:donation       - donations from attendees or other non-"sponsors"
expenses:videoteam
expenses:videoteam:shipping
expenses:travel   - attendee travel
expenses:food
expenses:accommodation
expenses:conf     - general conference expenses (e.g. name tags)
expenses:venue    - venue and venue furnishings, etc.
assets:spi
assets:ffis
assets:debian-uk
equity:debconf* - surpluses rolled over from debconf to debconf
equity:spi / ffis - amounts taken from / returned to Debian (in which organization).