Earlier this year we published preliminary fiscal year 2010 financials to the Governance page on the PASS web site. Please remember that FY10 runs from July 1st, 2009 through June 30th, 2010 and includes the November 2009 Summit. We do our fiscal year this way so that the Summit falls earlier in the fiscal year.
The financials we had posted were P&L numbers at the portfolio level. Prior to this we had posted our detailed budget but only posted the auditors report at the end of each year. Today we updated our published financials to include:
- Pre-audit actuals from FY10 at the same level as our budget. The document has both actuals and budget for FY10 side by side. This is over 20 pages of detailed financial information covering hundreds of line-items.
- A letter describing key differences between our budget and actuals. I walked through each line item where the difference was greater than $25,000 and explained what happened and why.
- We updated the financial graph going back to 2003 to include FY10.
This update should “close the loop” on our financials. You can now start with the published budget and compare it to the finished financials at the same level of detail. We also plan to publish the auditor’s report when that is completed -- as we do every year.
Overall I’m very happy with how FY10 turned out. Keep in mind that this was the November 2009 Summit so we were still facing economic challenges. With all that we were roughly break-even showing a $15,000 profit on $3.9 million of revenue. I didn’t find anything shocking in reviewing our actual vs. budget but there were a few things that needed explanation. You can see those in the letter on the governance page.
Please keep in mind that these are the actuals from our operating financials. The auditor may have us make adjustments for depreciation or other financial transactions. We may also account for certain transactions differently for tax purposes than we do for financial reporting purposes. I feel these financial statements give you the clearest picture of how our organization spends its money.
We were late publishing these this year. We were working through some tax issues and that delayed our ability to file our final tax forms which delayed this process. In hindsight I should have published these documents as soon as we had them and not waited for the tax issues. We’ll do this better in the future.
And on a final note, you don’t need to login to view these documents. If you have any questions you can post them here. If we get more than a few questions we may see about creating some forums for financial issues on the PASS web site.