As part of our commitment to being a transparent, community-owned organization, I wanted to share the basic budget for the upcoming Summit. Now that registration is cut off, we have most of our final numbers. Keep in mind that, at live events, things "on the ground" can change quickly - so these are, at present, only our expectations "going in."
- $113,833.51 in net registration fees. This is after paying credit card transaction fees.
- -$398.00 for event insurance (already paid)
- -$76,466.04 for the venue, which includes A/V, F&B, room rental, etc. (already paid)
- -$9,335.01 for speaker lodging (hotel)
- -$3,000 for professional event management (including travel for the event manager)
- -$1,490 for our registration web site (already paid)
- -$1,710.51 for deposit on the European Summit
- -$7,500 for speaker reimbursement
That last number is presently the big question; we have some speakers who paid for their registration, and we need to reimburse them. That's probably about $4,000. We have another $2,500 in promised travel offset fees to speakers doing 3 sessions. We're trying to reimburse additional travel expenses for other speakers so they're not totally out of pocket; the final number may be more than $7,500.
Right now, that puts us at an event profit of roughly $13,933.95. Again, some of that may end up going to additional speaker reimbursement; the rest will help fund PowerShell.org ongoing activities (like Azure hosting and so forth; I'll share a full annual operating budget in June, but it's about $17,000 per year). We have about $20k in payments coming up for the European Summit.
We have approximately $92,000 on-hand; much of that will go to the expenses above that are still pending. We should end April with around $65,000 on-hand - a lot of that comes from earning back a $40,000 pre-payment for the N.A. Summit that we made in fiscal 2013-2014. We'll use some of that $65k to cover the remaining $20k fees on the European Summit; the rest of our cash-on-hand will help provide deposits for the 2015 N.A. Summit, and to fund ongoing operations for 2014-2015. We're in good financial shape - we're making a bit more than we need, but not very much - which is right where we want to be.
The good news is that, between the Summits and our generous corporate sponsors, we're on track to actually find the $17k wish-list budget we've put together (which we're still researching and tweaking; as stated, I'll share the full thing in June). That means we'll be able to start spinning up services like the VERIFIED EFFECTIVE program, monthly TechSession webinars, and so on.
Not that it matters much in the long run (since it all goes against the overall company budget eventually, and it’s a relatively small amount), but it looks a little odd seeing a European Summit deposit listed as an expense against the N.A. Summit’s budget. Makes the N.A. Summit’s profit margin look slightly lower than it would be otherwise.
Because the Summits are really the only thing we make money on, we don’t run them as separate P&Ls; they’re considered a unit. Our fiscal year also plays into it – I prefer to pay our deposits before the end of the fiscal, since otherwise the company will end up paying taxes on money that it’s about to spend on deductible expenses anyway. So the N.A. Summit produces the money for the European Summit’s deposits… and vice-versa. And… “profit margin” isn’t really a goal. Yes, in an actual commercial concern, we might not keep the books that way. But, we consider the Summits (jointly) to be a single venture, and so they get accounted together. In fact, you’d have seen the 2013 European Summit in there, if there had been one. You WILL see the 2014 European Summit and 2015 N.A. Summit accounted together, when that time rolls around.