[Noisebridge-discuss] accountability of money

[Andy Isaacson]

On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 10:01:58AM -0800, Patrick Keys wrote:
> * There's seemingly no accountability for money at noisebridge.  If 
> there's a set of books anywhere (income statement and balance sheet), 
> it'd be nice to know where those are located.  apparently noisebridge 
> has a bank account and pay bills, but how any of that actually gets done 
> seems rather haphazard.

Thanks for taking an interest in this stuff!

We routinely discuss money and governance stuff at the Tuesday evening
meeting.  The next few weeks is rough as many people are travelling for
the holidays (our treasurer is trapped in London by snowfall, last I
heard), but we'll be getting back into it January 4.  Can you make
Tuesdays?

> * No accountability means no metrics.  Occasionally, I hear about how 
> noisebridge doesn't have enough paying members to cover its overhead. 
> But I've never heard any exact figure about the number of actual paying 
> members.  Nor have I heard about any goals for paying members.

We've only recently -- in the last month or so -- gotten our books in
enough order to know the answer to that question.  We've discussed the
results at several Tuesdays recently.

According to the most recent data I have (updated 2010-12-03) we have 75
members.  I believe we've consensed on two members since then, bringing
us to 77.  This excludes people who've ended their membership or gone
"on hiatus" -- in total we have membership records for 120 people.

Some fraction of that 77 have not paid dues for a while; our treasurer
and her minions are in the process of contacting them to see what's up.
That's already borne a lot of fruit.  One of the most common failures is
that Paypal randomly cancels recurring payments without notifying the
payer.

> * There's no system of checks/balances on spending of money.  People 
> routinely take the drink money and donations to pay for things, myself 
> included.  There's no system of knowing who took the money and how much 
> we got for it.

Yep.  I always send an email to treasurer at noisebridge.net when I do
that, but not everyone is aware that that's recommended practice.

(Cue long discussion about email versus webapps versus local apps versus
other communication methods.  No, on second thought don't -- we've had
that discussion before.)

> Here's my suggestions, which I encourage everybody to constructively 
> criticize:

Well, the first thing to realize is that, at Noisebridge, the people who
do things get to decide how to do them.  So what we babble about here on
the mailing list is irrelevant.

> * A dedicated accounting computer running quickbooks here at 

While I won't stop anyone from setting up infrastructure that they're
going to use for Noisebridge, I wouldn't do it that way -- I find
Windows very hard to use, and I hope we don't depend on proprietary
accounting software.  Also, depending on the information security of a
computer at Noisebridge seems like a bad idea to me.

> noisebridge.  If nothing else, we could keep track of cash flows, do 
> online banking, and manage memberships.  There'd also potentially be 
> some sort of paper trail if noisebridge is ever audited, as non-profits 
> are always ripe for audits.

We already have an account on Xero.com, and are using it for some
things.  Can we satisfy your use cases by providing a web app on Pony or
something like that, to run at Noisebridge and send data to Xero?
Obviously it'd have to be some kind of append-only system for the
accountant to reconcile and optionally discard when invalid data gets
entered, since physical security at Noisebridge isn't guaranteed.

> * Knowing exact numbers on paying members would allow us to set goals. 
> If we need about 60 paying members to break even (and we do), then 
> knowing we only have (for example) 40 paying members at least lets us 
> set a goal of attracting 20 more paying members.  Meeting those goals 
> allows us to set new goals and expand noisebridge with new features.

Member dues are our primary, but not our only, source of revenue
(donations from non-members are second, and donations from members in
excess of dues is third, IIRC.)  I'm against setting hard targets and
working to meet them solely to meet them; we can meet our needs in other
ways if we don't have the right number and mix of members.

> * The checks/balances of spending money kinda bothers me the most. 
> Sometimes the vibe feels like the default conclusion is to assume people 
> stole money, when in fact they used the money to buy drinks or snacks 
> for everybody.
> My solution to this one is to have a real procedure in place for taking 

I think that creating an easy way for people to document this is an
awesome idea!   I don't think trying to build an extremely "secure"
system is worthwhile, but making it easier for people to DTRT -- and
making sure people know what The Right Thing is so they can do it -- is
great!

-andy