Training Log Archive: barb

Event: 2016 Corn Maze Champs
 

Dave danced a lot more than I did.

We had a Navigation Games board meeting last night.
In addition to the Board (Sara Mae Berman, Linda Fobes, Deb Humiston (by phone), Dave Yee, Katia Bertoldi, and myself -- Julia Bishop was absent), we had guests Ed Despard, Giovanni Berlanda, Ethan Childs and Diego Berlanda.

The board approved the hiring of Ethan Childs through mid-February, going on faith that we can raise the money to pay for it. We will start a crowdfunding campaign soon, with a goal of raising $7500. We are hoping that another $5000 will come in from programs.

We talked about how to get set up to have employees, and spent quite some time on the background check question, with Katia agreeing to be our CORI representative.

There were a lot of good ideas about how to expand our school and camp programs, and some ideas for finding sources of income to support these efforts.

I have to review the detailed numbers with our Treasurer, but these are pretty close, rounded to the nearest $100, since inception last year of Navigation Games (we received 501(c)3 status in June of this year):

• $5700 raised and spent for three team travel/competition events in 2016
  
• $11,000 income in grants from local orienteering clubs, the City of Cambridge, and the SOS Memorial Foundation. ($3000 restricted for personnel for the summer program; $2500 restricted to pay for after school orienteering teachers)
  
• $3700 income from education programs delivered to schools
  
• Another ~$10,000 that went directly from the City of Cambridge to pay our teen employees this summer.
  
• $4500 spent on equipment, supplies, etc, with additional items not yet expensed.
  
• $5500 spent on personnel (teachers and coaches)
  

This includes money that doesn't officially come through our books, such as the teen employment program, but since we administered the program and we want to understand the actual cost & impact of our programs, we include for discussion.

 

  Income   Expenses

   5,700      5,700    Team travel and competition

   5,500      5,500    Teaching

  10,000     10,000    Teen employment program

   5,500               Unrestricted grants

   3,700               Program service fees

              4,500    Equipment and supplies

              2,000    Approximate unclaimed expenses

  30,400     27,700    Total

My time is all volunteer; any money we get my teaching and programs goes to Navigation Games. In addition, Dave and I have contributed goods and services that haven't gone into the books, but I am working toward having things captured going forward, so we can see what these prgorams really cost. Something I want to capture better is the number of volunteer hours, and how they are spent. We are using our house to store equipment, and as a meeting place. CSU and NEOC have contributed a lot that is not recorded here, such as use of maps, loan of equipment, and lots of moral support and ideas. And there is a lot of crossover in terms of volunteer personnel.

Ethan and I had a good mentoring phone call with Erin Schirm tonight. We focused on how to design the three classes that Ethan will be teaching for 16 weeks, starting September 19.

Got set up with MA to run CORIs.
Working on Workers Compensation and unemployment insurance; we have an employee number for MA UI.
Wednesday we'll walk through the other insurance options: auto, general liability, property, D&O, disability.
Still thinking about accounting systems. I had looked at some of the online systems, like Quickbooks, Xero and Aplos. Aplos is designed for non-profits and is based around fund accounting.
Each expense and income item will be tagged with account, program and funding source. We'll be able to calculate what portion of our net assets are restricted, and how.

The children's non-profit Variety has a nice approach to using UCOA along with program and funding source, and I'm drawing a lot from that.

Some things I like:

1. Account, program and funding source are three orthogonal aspects of any expense or income item.
   
2. You assign funding source periodically, like at the end of the month, based on what expenses meet the requirements of each restricted fund.
   
3. Program (=activity=purpose) is important to track separately from funding source - you want to know what each program is actually costing, and it may be funded both by restricted and unrestricted funds.
   
4. It may be convenient to pool some costs, and then assign them to programs periodically. Example: salary & related expenses -- at end of month, look at timesheet to figure out what programs to assign them to.
   
5. Funds designated by the Board are tracked, as funding source; the difference to restricted funds is that the Board can decide to change the designation. But it is important to have an explicit decision to *remove* designated funds and have that documented.
   
6. You want to be able to have a report that clearly shows how much of your assets are restricted vs unrestricted. Similarly, you want to be able to see how much of your income is restricted vs unrestricted. If you get a large donation for a specific purpose, you don't want to report your finances in a way that allows that donation to hide the fact that your core business functions are operating at a deficit, for example.
   

Avoiding the tail wagging the dog: if you document your spending, income, assets and liabilities clearly, then you can easily keep track of restrictions on funds and financial performance of different programs and so on. If you have accurate data, and the ability to create appropriate reports, you don't need to have separate bank accounts or adjust when your year is; you can create the reports to get the information you need to make good decisions.

Again:
First, you need to track accounts, for government reports and decision making.
Second, tracking by program/function helps for government reports (Program vs Management vs Fundraising) and for decision making.
Third, tracking funding source is necessary to honor the restrictions imposed by donors or granting agencies, as well as (in the case of board designated funds) to empower projects by giving them a feeling of control over their own budget -- they can have confidence that resources designated to them (including those generated by them, potentially) will be tracked and available across artificial time boundaries.

Keeping program and funding source as separate dimensions is important if you want to be able to clearly track and report on each dimension.

Note that net asset classifications (restricted, designated unrestricted, and undesignated unrestricted) can be calculated from the 3-dimensional revenue and expenditure data.

Nice white paper on FASB's statements about GAAP for nonprofits.
And the most important docs, Financial Accounting Standards 116 and 117.

From #116: "Since donor-imposed restrictions affect the types and levels of service a not-for-profit organization can provide, whether an organization has maintained certain classes of net assets may be more significant than whether it has maintained net assets in the aggregate. For example, if net assets were maintained in a period only because permanently restricted endowment contributions made up for a decline in unrestricted net assets, information focusing on the aggregate change might obscrue the fact that the organization had not maintained the part of its net assets that is fully avaialble to support services in the next period." That's actually quoted from FASB Concepts Statement #6.

Useful: Managing restricted funds

C • Online tools 5

C • I like this 1

Dave and I will get to see this kid on Sunday.

C • Oh 1