Hi Pine, although these questions fall outside my area of expertise, I can provide some quick partial replies.
On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 1:46 AM, ENWP Pine <[email protected]> wrote: > I appreciate the comprehensiveness of this report. > > I have a few questions about the finance section. Some are more basic than > others. > > Does WMF use the calendar year for its fiscal year? No, the Foundation's fiscal year runs from July to June. > > Is the financial plan for WMF to run a YTD deficit until the annual > fundraiser? As I understand it, yes. It seems a very obvious decision to me. This is no reason for concern, cf. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2012-2013_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Answers : "The Board of Trustees has established a rule of thumb that it would like the WMF reserve to never drop below six months of total spending. The 2012-13 plan therefore calls for the reserve to stay at a minimum of six months of total spending at the low point of the year." > > Why were recruiting expenses higher for the July-August timeframe? I thought > that WMF eliminated a recruiting contractor recently, so I would have > expected recruiting expenses to be lower rather than higher. > > Was August an unusually expensive month? If the total YTD expenses were > $5.2MM and August alone cost $2.6MM, I would be interested in knowing why > August was such an expensive month. YTD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year-to-date ) here means the timespan from July to August, see also the introductory remark "All financial information presented is for the period July 1, 2012 - August 31, 2012." So the answer would appear to be "no". As the report says, the expenses for August were actually slightly (3%) under plan. > > If in the July-August time period WMF "Completed our report to the Stanton > Foundation and received our second grant installment of $1.8 million", why > is there only $1.75 million of revenue shown in the table which includes > $1.0MM from the Sloan Foundation? These numbers don't seem to add up > correctly. I would have expected the revenue total to be at least $2.8MM > when including both of the grants. > > Thanks, > > Your finance and metrics enthusiast, > > Pine > Don't forget that today you will have the opportunity to watch our Garfield, our Chief Financial Officer, explain the new (September) numbers live in the Foundation's monthly metrics and activities meeting. -- Tilman Bayer Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications) Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
