Hoi,
Ehm, so you are happy when money is spend according to plan as it shows that
the plans were implemented and the budget was used according to plan... Now
I am really happy when there is a plan that will allow for the spending of
money according to a plan that will get us the results. I am even more happy
when the people spending the money are smart and find ways to improve on the
budget and spend less. In a company it is profit in a "Not for profit" is
allows for other / more activities, this is a different kind of benefit and
it is positive in my book.
Now when the WMF budgets for the acquisition of hardware and at the same
time tries to find donors to provide us with the same hardware, I think this
is an excellent way of operating because it allows for the donations not to
materialise.
When you are of the opinion that this is not the proper way to do this, then
i would say tough. I prefer a common sense approach that allows to spend our
money as effective as possible. Let me be clear on one thing; the money has
to achieve a goal. I want to see money spend, others want the WMF to have
reserves. Having sufficient reserves that prevent the WMF from having to
rely on donors is in my book excellent management.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 9:43 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Gerard Meijssen <
gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hoi,
This is not specific to non profit organisations, it is true for all
organisations. A dollar not spend is a dollar saved and a dollar profit.
This is what keeps the bean counters happy :)
Thanks,
GerardM
That only helps if your goal is "profit". For a non-profit, you don't
want
them to have lots of unplanned savings because that implies they have
not allocating resources effectively.
I don't think Nemo's comment about servers is fair (they are working well
by
historical standards), but at the same time one can ask: "Does not spending
this money mean that the mission is 6 months behind where it could be?"
Any
real budget will include contingencies and have unplanned variances, but at
the same time we don't want the budgets to be consistently too high OR too
low as it generally implies resources are not being allocated as
efficiently
as they could be towards accomplishing the Foundation's goals. We want to
know that unplanned resources go towards making the world better. Having
savings and a contingency fund can be part of that, but it should be part
of
the plan and not just something one falls into for the lack of other things
to do.
-Robert Rohde
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