[OSGeo Finance] Quickbooks, reserve funds...

[Paul Ramsey]

No, they aren't retained earnings, they are, as Jo said, Liabilities.
They are "things we owe to other people".  (Retained earning are just
this years new equity.)  I'm trying to figure out how a liability
account would interact with things like an invoice from a project
maintainer, paid out of the project pool.  Unlike other invoices, this
one doesn't represent a new liability, since all the project money is
already accounted for as a liability. I wonder of this model isn't a
little beyond the QuickBooks paradigm.

P.

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 5:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)
<tmitchell at osgeo.org> wrote:
> Frank said it all, but to toss in a few more terms, I'm wondering if these
> should be falling under Retained Earnings in the balance sheet.
>
> Tyler
>
> On 15-Oct-08, at 4:43 PM, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
>
>> Ken Tamura wrote:
>>>
>>> I will reply on this tonight when i have time to read the whole thread.
>>> Quick question first:   the funds contributed that you want to capture as
>>> detail, what is the obligation or restriction that deems it necessary to
>>> track over time?
>>
>> Ken,
>>
>> 75% of project sponsorships funds received for projects like GDAL are
>> held in trust by OSGeo on behalf of the project to be dispursed by the
>> project steering committee as they see fit.  We (as OSGeo) have an
>> obligation to be able to report on the funds available and the
>> transactions
>> made on behalf of the project when requested.
>>
>> We also need to distinguish between general funds that the OSGeo board
>> can spend freely and those we are holding for the projects and that we
>> should
>> not normally be touching.  Currently the balance sheet reports don't make
>> this
>> clear and we can get an inflated sense of the funds available for general
>> use.
>>
>> BTW - I say held in trust, but I mean that in a general sense rather than
>> a
>> legal sense.  The projects are not separate legal entities - they are
>> essentially just parts of OSGeo.
>>
>> Some additional detail is available in the "OSGeo Finance Management"
>> section
>> of the project sponsorship document:
>>
>>  http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Project_Sponsorship
>>
>> Best regards,
>> --
>>
>> ---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
>> I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam,
>> warmerdam at pobox.com
>> light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
>> and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent
>>
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