How was the number $81,827 arrived at? Is there an actual budget that you are working from even if you don't want to have a motion tie you directly to it? If so, may we see it? I am very interested to see income predictions (including projected ticket prices and sales) as well as expenditure line item totals budgeted. To be clear, this motion, as is, isn't approving a budget, it is approving only the "Total Expenses" amount in a budget and setting that as a cap. I don't have an issue with only setting the total expenses cap, I would just like to see the overall budget you guys are shooting for.
When you say that funds received from event sponsors are authorized "outside of this amount".... Are you meaning to say that all event sponsorship income received is also authorized to be expended and the total amount of event sponsorship income will be added to the approved expenditure amount of $81,827? Effectively making the total expenses budgeted for the convention to be $81,827 plus any and all event sponsorship income? And to be clear, that only the event sponsorship income actually received (not pledged or agreed to) is then authorized to be expended?
"Further, that the funds for expenditures shall be drawn first from the Convention Fund, and any remaining balance required shall be drawn from the General Fund."
Here, are you meaning to say that the Convention Fund shall be spent down to $0 first and any remaining expenditures owed up to the total above shall be "paid" from the general fund? Drawn implies taken but does not necessarily imply a transfer. It also indirectly implies "paid". I think I know what you mean here, but I want to be extremely clear about what this motion expects of the Treasurer.
For clarification to the body, convention expenditures rarely get spent directly from the Convention Fund. In fact, the only way that is possible is through ACH or wire. Where possible, we would pay those expenses via ACH directly from the Convention Fund. The credit / debit cards we have are tied to the General Fund only. So, the typical practice is to pay the expense from the General Fund and then transfer money into the General Fund from the Convention Fund to keep the balances in the respective funds accurate. Often times, my practice has been to make these transfers take place around a financial reporting date. Instead of cluttering up the bank statements as well as QuickBooks with a bunch of transfers, I can run a report showing me all of the expenses related to the convention that also shows me which account they were paid from. I can then take the necessary total and make the necessary transfer between accounts while creating an AJE (adjusting journal entry) in QuickBooks to account for it. Last convention, this even had to be done for income as our ticket income initially started out being deposited into the General Fund before the website could deposit it into the Convention Fund directly.
This process works similarly for all other Funds. The Legislative Action Fund has been able to pay the majority of its expenses via ACH, directly from the fund (Kevin gets paid and reimbursed via ACH as does Mrs. Hasket who is our HQ landlord). This is why a transfer of funds from the General was an easier solution to the possible problem of spending more money than an account has.
While this isn't a hill I remotely want to die on, I do not like planning via motion on draining an account. While it may seem efficient now, I find it to be financially irresponsible (albeit only slightly) on the part of the body as a whole. If I were not the treasurer and simply sitting on this body as district rep, I would want to know when we start having to pull money from the general fund because the convention fund is drained and I'd want to know exactly why we reached that point, before voting to approve being bailed out. If we were to get close to emptying an account, we could make a motion to solve that problem at that time, as we did with the LAF. Looking at last convention, though, I don't think that will be an issue as we started bringing in quite a bit of ticket income before any major expenditures. If we track similar to last convention, this won't be an issue and the clause in this motion won't have been necessary. If we don't track similarly to last convention, this will be an issue. And if this motion passes, this body won't even really be alerted to the fact that it is happening unless the bookkeeper or treasurer informs the body.
