The board of directors is responsible for the budget of the Joomla! Project. At the meeting in June (23rd) the board approved the budget for the fiscal year 2022/2023. The very short version is that the board has approved all requests made by departments. Now the slightly longer version.

At the moment the board approved the budget the project had around 350,000 USD in the bank accounts. In the past the approved budget was made in the way that the calculated spendings are not higher than the calculated income. This has led to the situation that we have a lot of money in our bank accounts.

This year we have a calculated income of 136,000 USD and calculated spendings of 236,700, so if all went according to plan we would make a 100,000 USD deficit.

The idea with the budget is quite simple, we don’t want to be the richest dead project. Another way of putting it is that it makes absolutely sense to spend money for the future of the project. We need to spend money to be better in the areas we are not so good at. One big part is documentation, all department coordinators agreed that this is a task we need to work on better and sooner rather than later. Whatever we can do to make teams work better together, is well worth spended money on. So we reserved money for in person team meetings. We have made sure that the teams have the resources and tools they need.

You might wonder why you read this now in the middle of the fiscal year. This post was planned for the beginning of the year but it never got finalised and published.

The good thing is that we now can review the plan we had and see if it's working. On the income side we are way behind the plan but we have some outstanding invoices. Chances are that we should reach the goal. On the spending site we are, apart from one area, also way behind what we have planned to spend. Just a few personal meetings have happened and other expenses have not been made so far. Unfortunately we had many more legal costs as we had expected. Some of these costs will be covered by insurance but at the moment we had to pay.

So the half year summary could be: Could be better but we are not in trouble.