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Budgeting
Here is how we do budgeting, we split the cost estimates in two:
- Varying, scaling costs which are covered by the ticket price for each attendee and which scale up/down with attendee numbers
- Fixed, base costs which are covered by the sponsorship money
This enables us to never get into financial problems if attendants were to drop, as long as we keep the fixed costs inline with the amount of money raised through sponsors. This way of structuring things prevents the organizers from having to put up money or run personal financial risk due to investing money in the conference.
See Accounting for details on financial reporting.
In order to keep the costs under control, we prioritize the things we want to do for the conference into three levels. This enables us to have clear goals for raising sponsorship money. Each level is a new milestone and it eases communication about where we're at.
- Level 1: the bare minimum required to host the conference, which means renting a venue, some speakers and our running costs for services like hosting, etc
- Level 2: This is where we add more things like merchandising, gifts for speakers, party expenses, etc
- Level 3: Level 3 is the level where we get to do all the things we want to do. This is what we aim for when it comes to raising money.
We need to pay VAT on our ticket income and assets need to be set aside to pay for that in March/April the following year. The formula for calculating how much VAT we must pay is pretty simple:
Ticket income divided by 1,25 and multiply by 25%
This is structured into the following sections (all the links are for the 2015 budget).
- Status: high level overview on how we're doing
- Sponsor costs: the fixed cost budget with the levels, it has summary columns which are linked to the sponsors spreadsheet.
- Varying costs: the budget covered by the ticket price
- Ticket income: the estimate on ticket income, which contains the types of tickets and their price. The numbers here are used in the varying costs sections
This is the sheet used to keep track of the sponsors and how that's all going.
- Summary: This is the overview summarizing how we're doing
- Status: The list which shows who's signed, who's been approached and who's on the short list to contact next.
- Packages: Our sponsorship packages are in here, with their price and how many are available. This information along with the status are all fed into the budget.