Food Protection Trends - January 2010 - 14

from the executive director s was brought to your attention in this column last month, the financial year ending August 31, 2009 was not kind to our bottom line or to o u r G e n e r a l F u n d re s e r ve s . The independent auditors have completed their work and agreed with our accounting methods and internal controls. Our financial report for 2009 is shown on page 52. The end result shows that we have a $400,000 loss to incur from the general operations of the Association. There are a number of ways to dissect this loss, but the simplest way to explain the loss is as follows: $ 70,000 The approved budget projected a $70,000 loss 209,000 Shortfall from projected Annual Meeting net income 124,000 Shortfall from proj e c t e d i n ve s t m e n t income $403,000 Even with this “bad news,” there are some positive financial results that occurred during the year. For the European Symposium, we had budgeted for a $10,000 loss and experienced a $33,000 net gain for a positive result of $43,000 when compared to budget. In addition, we budgeted to make $10,000 from our special symposia (rapid response and timely topics symposia) and exceeded that by almost $10,000 for a total net income from those special symposia of $19,800. “COMMENTARY” By DAVID W. THARP, CAE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR “The good news is that we had built up reserves to ‘weather a storm’ like this one” Web site functionality cost about $85,000, but we are able to amortize this expense over five years meaning that the expense portion for this year was $17,000. The last major expense in this budget year was for membership material redesign and printing. For this activity, we had budgeted about $8,000 but incurred a total of $38,000 in design and printing fees. So, these “unbudgeted” expenses totaled about $77,000. Those unbudgeted expenses were partially offset by the excess revenue items of the European and Special Symposia ($43,000 and $10,000 respectively). This being the case, we could have been much closer to our “budgeted results” had it not been for the Annual Meeting shortfall and our investment loss. Of course this is not a direction we can continue, but the good news is that we had built up reserves to “weather a storm” like this one. We now have $268,600 in our General Fund. The following shows our year end General Fund balances since 1998. You can see that 2003 was when we first “broke into the positive” for a fund balance: 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 -70,524 -38,601 -16,551 - 1,546 -64,007 28,067 190,724 502,735 578,245 760,474 668,638 268,614 There were also a number of areas where we spent out monies during the year. Web site development costs totaled about $60,000 during the year where we had budgeted only $30,000 for this activity. Membership software that was necessary for the new 14 FOOD PROTECTION TRENDS | JANUARY 2010

Food Protection Trends - January 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Food Protection Trends - January 2010