Finances and accounts

 

Starting up – a small gift and a small loan

To get the ball rolling in a professional manner David Sharman made a small initial donation (a gift) of about £230, and has also made a larger unsecured zero-interest loan of about £1000. Hopefully that loan will be repaid out of any donations until hopefully the Association moves into surplus. Repayments will be done at a rate of 50% of any donations unless you request otherwise (i.e. if you donate $100, then $50 would go towards repaying the loan, and $50 would go into the normal working funds). If you specify otherwise we will respect your wishes. If no-one makes a donation then David loses his loan, but that’s his risk. Donations can either be anonymous (i.e. the bank account knows who sent it, but we won’t say in the financial statements), or be fully disclosed, just let us know your preference. [update: 05-Feb-2022, repayment has commenced with a slug of £500 given that things are running smoothly].

Start-up budget

In round numbers the start-up budget is : £16 for domain registration (corbin39.org); £1160 to Didier (http://didier.co.uk/) for an initial static holding page, scoping work, and the initial website structure and graphics. This includes some one-time costs for various WordPress plug-ins. The scope and brief was done by David, and data loading and content development is done by David, so Didier’s fees are targetted purely at getting a professional-level website result. Of this some £230 is a donation and the balance is a loan from David. Web server hosting fees are currently nil as David has some spare capacity available on a VPS he runs. An unknown cost is how much it will take to get AIS-tracking working, and in any ongoing annual fees for that, but that is very much an add-on if donations allows. Likewise no decisions have been made about video hosting or not. Our next priority is probably a photo-wall and we are investigating that. No budget has been allocated for buying-out old domains (corbin39.com) as we don’t consider it to have a significant intrinsic value.

Ongoing annual budget

Domain fees are trivial, maybe $20/year. At some point the Association will either need to rent its own VPS solution (about $1,000/year) or go into shared hosting (probably $200/year depending on quality desired). So far the backup solution is free. Directionally it is reasonable that the Association could – if it had to – run itself for somewhere between $200 – $1000/year which is a level that ought to be achievable from a donation model.

Bank accounts

We have the one UK-based bank account, which has no costs associated with it. Since we can easily receive credit or debit card payments via PayPal from any country it doesn’t seem necessary to have any other bank accounts. The PayPal fees are rather unpredictable depending on who is sending what from where, but so too are international bank transfer fees. Our bank account details are set out on the accounts below.

Financial information / statements (i.e. accounts)

See below for a pdf of the Association’s running financial accounts. Any questions please ask us.

Latest accounts (05 02 22)

» View pdf