Hello,

So I've attached a proposed budget for 2022. What I did was just take all of the "regular things" that we've authorized for the last couple years and repeated them on a spreadsheet. The idea is to be straight forward and track the things that we regularly do, and make the financial reporting on a monthly basis more useful. A few comments or points:

The budget is not balanced. You'll noticed that it has more income than expense. While it is not our goal to make money, I think that we should solve this with one-time expenses (programs, projects, etc.) which typically wouldn't exist on an annual budget.

This does not authorize expenditure. The Inkscape PLC has always authorized individual expenditures and a budget separately, I think it makes sense to continue in that tradition. So for instance if we find determine that a hackfest is going to be all Europeans and they travel by train, it probably won't be $8K. But, we can authorize the specifics of that expense when we know more. We're more setting up a yard stick (meter stick) to measure by than spending money directly.

Adding things is great. I'm all for adding things, but I'd rather add broad brush strokes than details of individual expenditures, leave those detailed debates for the individual authorization votes. Also, I don't think it should include one-time things unless we expect it to be one-time every year (i.e. Outreachy). I don't want the budget itself to get bogged down in all that. It is only guidance, not authorization.

The numbers I used are kinda optimistic. We've authorized for conference expenses for about $250, but never twice in the same year. I hope that we'll be able to do more in 2022, but clearly our contributor's health takes priority. (same for having a hackfest at all)

There are categories. I don't know if the grouping makes sense or adds value, but it felt right. Happy to hear about how folks things should move around or the categories should be changed.

Unbudgeted Items. I left a category for this so that we could track things throughout the year. My thought was that as we authorize various things we could add them here. Hopefully then we'll see "actual" get closer to spending our income (or more!) throughout the year.

I'd love to hear people's comments and ideas and get them integrated, and try to put together a vote by the end of the year so we go into 2022 strong!

Thanks,

Ted

On Dec 3 2021, at 10:03 am, Ted Gould <ted@gould.cx> wrote:

Howdy folks,

So I think we should really have a budget, even if we don't follow it 100%, just a good practice and idea. We basically stopped doing it in 2018. My idea is to put something very high level and simple together, nothing exciting mostly just our regular stuff (for instance we can still vote for one-off things here an there, etc.). But I do want us to feel like we have a plan and instead of financial reports just being numbers be related to something.

My goal is to have something we can vote on by the end of the calendar year.

If you've got ideas, please reply to this thread or ping me on chat sometime.

Ted

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