[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Treasurer update: 2013 budget, accounting and 501c3 status

[Daniel Morissette]

OSGeo Members,

This email is to give you a few quick updates on OSGeo's finance front:

1- 2013 budget

The 2013 budget has been adopted at the 2013-04-11 board meeting. It is 
available in the wiki at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Budget_2013

2- Outsourcing of book keeping and accounting

Since the early days of OSGeo, all book keeping and accounting was done 
by our Executive Director, and then in 2011 I took over those tasks as 
treasurer. However accounting is better done by a real accountant and 
having a volunteer treasurer handling those tasks is not sustainable in 
the long run, especially when the treasurer is likely to change from 
year to year. For this reason we are looking into options to outsource 
the book keeping and accounting tasks to an accountant knowledgeable 
about nonprofits to help keep our books straight, produce regular 
financial statements, and mostly insure continuity between treasurers 
from year to year. We may have found a skilled and affordable resource 
to handle this for us. One of the first tasks for this resource would be 
to review and cleanup the books from past years as needed and then 
produce formal financial statements for fiscal years 2011 and 2012 that 
we can then share with our members. More info about this in the not too 
distant future I hope.

3- Non-profit status with the IRS (a.k.a. 501c3 status)

Our nonprofit status in the US is not resolved yet. We had an exchange 
with the IRS agent responsible for our case a few weeks ago and provided 
some missing information. I expect that we will hear back from them soon 
with a decision on our status. More info about our recent exchanges with 
the IRS is available at 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/501c3_Application:_Questions_from_IRS,_September_2012

That's it for now

Daniel (OSGeo Treasurer)