Talk:Financial reports

New financial summary page

We had some great conversations around financial transparency at the Chapters meeting in Berlin earlier this year. One of the many great ideas that came up was to create a community-edited financial reports page on meta that would provide a quick reference on the financial results and reporting of all the entities across our movement, modelled after the really useful Reports page. This page seems like as good a place as any to do it, and I hacked together a quick start over the past few days. There is still lots more work to be done filling it in, and I know that due to different accounting rules and other regulations it's a bit of work to create a set of comparable numbers. But it would be really useful to have a summary of financial information from across the movement. And since budgets/actuals only come out once a year, I hope each chapter/organization can keep updated fairly easily.Stu 04:33, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

By the way, I wasn't sure what format to follow in terms of information requested. The balance is between the value of detailed information, and the difficulty in creating it. So I leaned toward pretty simple revenue breakdowns (show the Transfer to the WMF so it's clear for example how much revenues are retained by a chapter), and then showing the breakdown used by the Foundation for its Functional Allocation of Expenses. I recognize not everyone will use the same kind of breakdown, but it would be awfully nice to have some kind of consistent presentation across all entities. Another way we could do it is to use spending along the five high level strategic priorities from the movement's strategic plan: Stabilize Infrastructure, Increase Participation, Improve Quality, Increase Reach, Encourage Innovation. What do you think?Stu 04:42, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Global vs local

I'm just getting rid of those headlines which make little sense. There are things that chapters do that are global (Toolserver, international conferences, support to other chapters for example) and there are things that WMF does that are local (Public Policy Initiative, or actions in India and Brazil which are meant to have a local impact, not a global one). I find this strange cut to be somewhat irrelevant to this table, and rather misleading, actually. If we want to keep this, we should probably have two columns under programs: local and global, and make sure we can pinpoint in the different budgets what money goes exactly where. notafish }<';> 09:19, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Seems like a fine change. i was just copying the format from Reports.Stu 14:57, 16 October 2011 (UTC)