I'm Tommy, I love spreadsheets, organizational finances, cooperative development and the required non-hierarchical leadership, and so on. Plenty of other things too. I love questions, feedback, and extensive critiques of things I say.

I've got some excheque'ing to catch up on, so I apologize if this email isn't all fully formed and brimming with data and information.

If anyone missed the meeting last evening and would like to take a look at what those fiscal solvency sheets look like right now, the URL for the current version is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlKk2X9KKqlFdFZJUy12ZUhDUmx2N3hUZldyejlXdFE&usp=sharing#gid=7 (credit to Hol for the standing fund contribution logic on the "current" worksheet, w00t do-ocracy). I'd happy to go over them with anyone who's interested.

These are totally, totally a work in progress, and right now really serve as what a few of us were thinking for the next few months. After we get hard numbers in there and go through the process once or twice, I think logic will start to make a lot of sense. Right now, it's pretty much just a test case.

Obviously, surpluses and defining the projects will help us fill out and test various ways to implement the worksheet where members get to allocate / crowdfund various projects (currently worksheet 4, will be worksheet 3 soon).

If you have any ideas for the spreadsheets and want to play around with them in a significantly altering way, Google Doc's offers a convenient option on worksheets to copy them into other existing workbooks, allowing for "fork" style code-editing (with few of other revision control features, but I'm happy to do things by hand, for now...)

Proposals for discussions I heard recently and hope to have soon:

- Building in long-term predictions in some kind of concrete and useful way

- Documenting the spreadsheet with comments such that any new member can quickly read and understand the budget spreadsheet and its logic... (I've done these before, and will try to make a similar document.)

- Financially modeling expansion options, especially against membership growth predictions (totally a "sensitivity analysis" kind of spreadsheet... a favorite!)

- Assessing our banking options - credit unions?, etc - now that we've got some momentum.

- Anything you'd like to suggest.

The future is ours for the... making.

-----------------
Thomas Riley York (杨德民) 510.926.0510
http://www.linkedin.com/in/tommyyork

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 12:27 PM, Anthony Di Franco <di.franco@gmail.com> wrote:

After a long period of semi-benign neglect of the weightier aspects of the Excheqing, I am happy to pass the function on to the eminently qualified Tommy York. In addition to having drafted a new set of fiscal solvency sheets for us which look like they will serve us very well, he brings experience running coop finances and a business degree to the task.

This could not come at a better time, since the regular budget surpluses I mostly passively functioned over mean that we will very soon be crowdfunding sudo projects with our surplus income. My day job is now to write an accounting system for a crowdfunding and community currency platform with significant conceptual overlap with our own financial processes, and to the extent I am able contribute this sort of automation to what we do at sudo room, I will deeply appreciate the guidance and leadership of someone with a firm handle on the business issues at the core of things.

As is our ancient sudo custom, after the obligatory series of polite, coy refusals by Tommy, the Excheqatorial sceptre was dropped and waved in the prescribed manner, and the information on the accounts was handed over, and the ritual of assumption is now complete.

Welcome to the future, Tommy!