More on Cost Accounting

Sorry I missed the last meeting, and I wanted to follow up on a note from Barb, about the principles behind the financial reporting. I think it helps if you think of it in terms of layers.

At the top level, we have the Folk Project Profit & Loss (P&L) Report, where everything is consolidated into a single set of numbers. All the Dues are in Dues, and the Admissions in Admissions and so forth. Easy peasey.

The "Departmental" P&L that I distribute each month shows where those profits and losses originate, because I think that provides the richest understanding of cash flows. On this report, you can see that both the Festival and the Minstrel produce some membership dollars along with the rest of their income. I suppose you could have a philosophical argument about whether these departments "deserve" that income, but I don't think that's really the point.

That's because we can look at the information in many different ways. If you log into QuickBooks, you'll see I've added a new report, in a possibly expanding category that I'm calling Analysis. It's the same as the Activity P&L for the Minstrel, but it's excluding Dues and Merchandise sales.

So I wanted to reassure folks that there's no danger of confusion, and no loss of our ability to see what's going on. If anything, the on-line access makes that easier than ever. As long as the Minstrel reports Dues and Merchandise sales on its Tally Sheets, its easier for the Treasurer to capture that information in a single transaction. We can always slice and dice it for analytical purposes later.

If anyone is interested in a more detailed conversation about this, let me know. I can answer questions for just one person, either live or on the phone, but if we had a handful of interested folks, maybe we could have a small meeting. (Might be a good thing for anyone potentially interested in taking on this job, when my term runs out.)

Chris Riemer