[Foundation-l] Mid-year Financial Statement, follow-up questions/answers

Fri Mar 7 12:16:09 UTC 2008

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 6:53 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 07/03/2008, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>  > On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Jay Walsh <jwalsh at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>  >  >  Several weeks ago we posted our first mid-year financial statements on
>  >  >  the Foundation wiki.  A few questions have come in, on-list since then.
>  >  >   One referred to depreciation of furniture/equipment and the other to
>  >  >  the 'employee receivables' line.
>  >  >
>  >
>  > My biggest question at this point is why doesn't the "retained
>  >  earnings" account match the prior year's "net assets"?
>
>  It's only out by about $16k, there are various things that could
>  account for that - the time periods not matching perfectly, for
>  example. It's not significantly different.
>
It's out by about 1% if you use the "retained earnings" account as the
denominator.  Of course, it's a pretty important account to match,
probably the single most important one.  I don't think the new
auditors are going to buy the "oh it's immaterial" argument.

Even more material is that the bulk of the missing debit corresponding
to the missing credit seems to be accounts receivable, which is off by
$13693 (comparing the balance minus the cash flows to the prior
period), which is more than 50% (or more than 100% if you look at it
that way).