You read this backwards. He didn’t say “I’m not donating because they accept and store bitcoins”, but “I’m donating and I don’t think the money I donate should be used to cover losses from gambling money in bitcoins” which I think is a valid point of view.
I am indeed not an accountant, I was treasurer for another non-profit for a few years but we didn’t have to manage multiple currencies there. Personally I think the financial report does a decent job at giving an idea of how finances are going, and is probably simpler to generate the way it is now. I like seeing details on where the money comes from (roughly, in US versus EU way) through it. But if you are an accountant and want to do things more professionally, that would work just as well for me, and is probably a lot more useful in other situations. As I said earlier the inc is open to new people applying to it and personally I think it would be a good idea to not have only developers in there, but some people representing the interests of users as well.
I AM an accountant and I haven’t ignored anything Pulko has said. Incidentally, I have a high opinion of him as a developer and as a human being. But he’s not an accountant.
I think the accounts could be improved, and I don’t think Hailku should keep Bitcoin any longer than it absolutely has to. It’s risky.
Hi. Another accountant here. Just want to notice that, besides 18.900 USD and around 2300 Euro incomes in 2019, the Bitcoin incomes is just 35 USD. About less than 0,2% of the total.
I’m not an expert in cryptocurrency, but probably the operation to convert it to USD probably had a minimal commision cost that will made it not very economically viable too, when the value is low.
Well someone given a bitcoin or two to Haiku a long time ago when it was worth almost nothing, and they didn’t bother to do anything with it (it wasn’t worth the effort at the time).
Now it’s worth 27000$ and suddenly it’s “wasting a lot of money”. These things get out of control very fast. And yes, they should convert it to actual money now, and actually use that money to do something
@Sebrof if you have an example of a better format for the financial report I would be happy to try that. I made that report mainly based on what we have done for years.
As PulkoMandy said we keep the currencies separate to provide a more accurate picture because the accounts are in those currencies. I find conversion to be a very lossy process so try to avoid it for something like a financial report.
I am not an accountant but I try my utmost to have all accounts balance to the penny for the report. I have considered trying to improve the format but I can barely make the report as is so I did not want to burden myself further and cause more delays. But I have all the raw numbers so we can change things up if someone helps me.
Also all criticism in this thread about Haiku, Inc is well deserved. Unfortunately it is one of those things where it just wasn’t set up correctly in the first place by the original founder, and those of us “stuck” in it have not had the time to fix the situation with updated bylaws, etc. Then people like PulkoMandy who might have the time don’t want to join and end up getting stuck like we are.
It should be made clear though that being a member of Haiku, Inc is primarily a burden and should only be done out of love and care for the project. By design Haiku, Inc does not have power over the direction of the project. People should not expect members of Haiku, Inc to provide leadership for the project. We just maintain some stuff behind the scenes. I know PulkoMandy understands this and probably most other long time developers do but I suspect many community members don’t understand that.
I try my best to fulfill the duties of Treasurer and I’ve done okay recently but had a few bad years for sure. My wife had a baby in July and since I am literally the only one who can update the donation meter it has not been updated since then. I use software I wrote for this myself and unfortunately it happens to be on a machine I cannot currently use because I had to move my office to make room for the new baby, and that machine needs hard-wired internet and I have not had a chance to move my router. It is really stupid stuff but lately I’ve had a lot of other concerns than Haiku, sorry
This is my first time in the forums for months too. I will try my best to document what I do for Haiku treasurer stuff so that other people can help and maybe someone else can take over. I used GnuCash years ago but stopped maintaining that and recently I’ve just been using stuff I wrote myself to make the financial report from CSV files, etc. Obviously it would be better if we had a real accountant.
Finally to bring this sort of rambling post to an end it is the responsibility of those of us in Haiku, Inc to safe guard the funds trusted to us. There is plenty to complain about Haiku, Inc and the current members, but we have safeguarded the money. We have to be careful about bringing in new people and giving them access to more than $100,000 in cash, plus some Bitcoin. Maybe Alex and I are overly cautious (I think Haiku has a good community of people), but nonetheless we can’t just drop things, hand over the “keys” and run away. Hopefully we can detach ourselves eventually but it will have to be a slow process and Haiku, Inc needs to be controlled by people who can be trusted and have the projects interests in mind.
Ryan, thanks for that very full and honest response to my earlier post.
I fully understand the difficulties involved in trying to keep tabs on the finances when you have other demands on your time, are not being paid, don’t have appropriate software, and are not trained in book-keeping.
I also fully take on board your concern about giving persons unknown the key to the bank accounts. This was why I suggested that instructions to the bank to make payments should be made by long-standing officers of the organisation upon receipt of a request by the book-keeper/accountant (with supporting documents, like an invoice).
Most accounting software packages are able to produce financial reports in a standard form at the press of a button, and I think this would be a good way to go. There would of course be a cost, but given the sums of money involved, and the time it would save, I think the cost would be a price worth paying.
However, there is one accounting package that costs nothing (but it does have fairly unobtrusive ads). This is Adminsoft. I checked it out a couple of years ago. It’s basic, but it does the job.
I’d be happy to help set it up if anyone would like to use it. As it’s free, anybody could download the package and support or take over from the book-keeper when required. The files would be in the cloud.
Well done for your efforts over the years. I know your name, and had noticed that you hadn’t been very active recently.
The reason I moved away from accounting packages is a 95% of our transactions are automated, and the effort to enter those into an accounting package does not seem worth it.
Maybe we could set up some sort of integration with PayPal and Wells Fargo and our other services to automatically bring those transactions in, but to be honest the system I set up for 2019’s report worked well for me and does not require a lot of hands-on work. Basically we get a bunch of donations from PayPal, have automatic payments for our servers and related stuff, and then there are a few unique transactions here and there. I wrote a small program which pulls that data in from CSVs and then adds things up into categories.
But you may a good point about how easy it would be to pass off a cloud based accounting set up to someone else, so I can look at that.
If you have an example of a better financial report format we could use please send a link. But our requirements are fairly simple and I would prefer to keep the report easy to read for the average person.
Ryan,
I have drafted a set of basic accounts which should be comprehensible to the average intelligent person (which means definitely intelligible to most Haikuisti).
However, I have had to make some assumptions, and would like you to see it, comment on it, and if necessary correct it, before making it public.
Please email me at johnforbesfca at yahoo.co.uk and I will send it to you. This is a now redundant email address so if it gets flooded with spam it doesn’t matter.
Cheers
Do I have the time? Maybe, but at the expense of other things I’m doing in Haiku (like running GSoC and mentoring students, reviewing patches, triaging bugs, and writing code).
But more importantly, I don’t want to join and then be the one stuck in Haiku inc forever. If there were bylaws saying my term is limited, I’d join for, say, 3 years, and then rotate with someone else. I think kallisti5 actually wrote a proposal for these bylaws and the inc wasn’t even able to vote to approve them.
There’s also the fact that I’m trying to keep some balance in things. I already do a lot of things in Haiku, and I think it’s important that I can take breaks for whatever reasons without endangering the project, and I don’t want to take control of everything. So, I’d say I’m not the best choice for running the Inc. Several people have offered to help in this thread and already in the past, and I think there are long term Haiku users and supporters who would be good choices. And it seems a good idea to not wait until you have absolutely no time and leave the inc and we have to pick someone else to replace the full staff. Much better if we do it while the existing members are still somewhat around and can take the time to explain how things are run to the new ones.
I think the best way to handle this is announce that some of the current board members left (Urias just did) or are about to leave, and so getting new people on board is needed. I think all you need is writing a blogpost about it, but I can’t do that for you (“you” being the inc, here).
It seems to me (judging from the scant information available) that Haiku, Inc., makes no distinction between management and membership. And it probably should do.
If you hold shares in Microsoft, for example, you take no part in the running of the company, but you do get to vote on who the directors are, and on other strategic issues in accordance with the company’s constitution.
This is what I believe should be happening at Haiku, Inc… All interested parties (developers and others who contribute in one way or another) should be members. They should be invited to an annual general meeting, where they hear about the highlights of the year just ended and the plans for the future. They should receive and approve the accounts, and they should appoint or re-appoint the directors. They should hold the directors to account for any failures, and praise them for their successes.
The directors of an organisation that relies on unpaid people to do all the work cannot direct the efforts of such people in the same way that they can with paid employees, but they can set clear strategic goals, and encourage people to work towards them.
And if those who do the work are involved in setting the goals, they will buy into them.
As we approach the stable release of Haiku it is likely that there will be a great deal of interest in it as an alternative to other operating systems. This will bring opportunities, not least for increasing Haiku’s revenues and having more money to spend. Haiku, Inc. needs to be ready for this, or opportunities will be missed.
I believe that Haiku’s present constitution needs to be overhauled. Back in 1779 people were saying “No taxation without representation”. Let’s modify that slogan slightly and say “No contribution without participation”. I don’t mean that as a threat, but as a principle. Let’s have a formal structure that gives Haiku’s contributors a say in what happens to Haiku.
Well, it was not set up with that goal in mind. The inc does not set goals for the project. That’s not its goal. Its goal is just to collect donations and spend them to support the project.
It’s indeed a bit unusual. Basically, the developer team is an independant entity from the inc. The developers decide what to work on and how to priorize things.
As a result, Haiku inc is originally a somewhat administrative-only entity. They would pay for website hosting or that kind of thing. So, no membership was really needed, only the management part. The project existed before the Inc and remained as a different entity.
Later on, things changed a bit, as with GSoC and GCI the inc started receiving thousands of dollars every years from Google. They spent some of it on coding sprints and on hiring developers, but still they have lot of money spared (which is a good thing, but sometimes they need to spend some, too).
Then there are maybe more controversial decisions like entering in Outreachy (where we have to pay an intern).For such things, maybe a different governance model would be needed.
Anyway, I should also mention (again) that there is another non-profit supporting Haiku, that is the german based Haiku Support Association. They do have a separate membership/management system in place, with a paid membership. I know some people are not too happy about this model because it seems not so nice that people have to pay to get a voting right in anything related to Haiku. It seems better that people get their voting right from continued involvement in the community and dedication, even if they can’t afford to pay a membership.
So, this would raise more questions. Should we end the split between Haiku inc and the Haiku project which are currently quite independant from each other? Or should we keep it as it is? Should membership be paid? If we keep the split between the two entities, what would the inc decide on exactly, since most of the technical things are instead supposed to be decided on the Haiku project side?
Personally I’d say the “project” side works reasonably well. Despite everyone outside the project complaining about the lack of progress, we’ve been going on for 20 years and built a quite usable system and discussions are (slowly) ongoing for beta3 and then the roadmap to R1 and beyond.
If we want to get there faster, what we need isn’t really focus (I think all devs are currently doing as much as they can already). What we need is the inc to hire one or more of the devs so they can spend more time working on the things. Given the current situation that probably means hiring someone, and then doing some marketing/outreach to increase donations so we can keep that working in the long term.
On the marketing side, what we need is the inc to let more people access the social media accounts which aren’t used to their maximum potential currently. More news on the website. And so on. Things have been quite idle there since Matt Madia left the inc for lack of time, but it looks like bitigchi is trying to get these things up and running again.
I don’t know, does that make sense or qm I just too used of working around the inc instead of working with them?
On the organisation side, The Document Foundation is a nice example that flourished before our very eyes since 2011. They are managing quite an infrastructure. Although I don’t agree with much of their administrative decisions, it’s being governed well. Haiku Inc. can look to them for some ideas.
I take what you say about the original purpose of the Inc, but time moves on and Haiku needs to position itself for the future. I am sure the German organisation does good work, but the existence of a separate entity reminds me of the fragmented mess that is Linux. One of the best things about Haiku is that it’s not Linux, which looks like a load of ants without a queen.
The Document Foundation example is certainly one that needs to be looked at, and perhaps emulated, in whole or in part. LibreOffice is now an excellent product, and continues to improve.
