[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Question: How much does administration in Chapters cost the Wikimedia movement?

[Fae]

Hi Tomasz, I knew the chat we had over a tasty fresh fish dinner in
Milan would pay off :-)

On 25 April 2013 12:28, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you want, we can try with Wikimedia Polska. Here there is a rough table:
> http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/U%C5%BCytkownik:Polimerek/Spraw_zarzadu#Finanse
> just showing our ratio of operational costs and other parts of our
> costs for 2012.

It looks like a good executive top level summary, though I am relying
on Google translate. :-D

> In our case the operational costs are well defined by general rules of
> accounting, but they differ from your definition - i.e. it does not
> cover all salaries if they are integral part of the projects, but does
> cover salaries of our secretary and accountant. But for example it
> also covers cost of our toolsever and internet domains...

I don't see any problem in salaries (or contractor fees) that relate
to project activities being declared as "program costs". We should
just take care that these are not used to account for regularly
recurring costs which ought to logically be thought of as
administration even if "technical" costs.

> IMHO the general reporting could be like this:
> *General operational/office costs (salaries of office workers, cost of
> maintaining office, cost of legal stuff, cost of travels and meetings
> of workers and members of the boards and other "decisive bodies")
> *Technical infrastructure costs (servers etc. + salaries of
> technicians who maintain it )
> *Costs of projects and special programs (overall, salaries, meetings,
> travel, technical, others) - maybe spread by a type of program (ie.
> producing content, software improvement, outreach, promotion, others)
>
> +
>
> *General info about overall costs of all salaries (easy to calculate
> and define).
> *General info about costs of all travel reimbursements (easy to
> calculate as well)
> *General info about costs of all meetings and conferences.

Excellent, so quickly looking at your Income and Expenditure tables,
let's take Ad's good practice ratio and define the 3 categories needed
as:

fundraising =
  administering grants and fund applications
  (I can see your grant, other income and membership dues, but not the
cost of managing these; it may be better to estimate them and deduct
them from "administration" rather than leaving this as zero)

program =
  costs of projects and special programs
  (I would add your costs of conferences and scholarships (stypendia)
payments here)

administration =
  general operational/office costs +
  technical infrastructure costs (unless specific items can be
identified as 'program')

I am unsure where Promotion (Promocja) fits in, this may need to be
broken down a little more if it splits between the 3 categories above.
Does this mean that you could now calculate a provisional 'fundraising
: program : administration' ratio?

Cheers,
Fae
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