SICACT Treasurer's Report

This is a short note on the state of SIGACT. Overall, SIGACT is quite financially healthy at this point, with a continuation of the net positive influx of funds that has been the trend over the past few years. There is currently a substantial buffer of money that allows flexibility to implement some innovative programs and to update to new technologies and ways of operating as a group that will make it even more streamlined and effective in the future. As of the end of fiscal 1995 (June 1995), we had a net surplus of $295K that has been building up over the years. At the beginning of 1995, the surplus was $186K, so this grew by $109K in one year. There seem to be a few primary factors that contributed to this buildup. A significant factor is that conferences axe consistently being budgeted in a way that on average they have a small net surplus, and the truth is that they do a bit better than they are even budgeted for. Thus, in 1995, large conferences had a net surplus of $30K, compared to a projected net surplus of around $20K. On the revenue side of the picture, items that earned significantly more than expected include the SIG membership plus package ($22K above the budget), interest income ($8.7K above the budget), and other meetings and conferences ($8.5K above the budget). Revenue items for which the net was slightly less than expected include the SIG DUES ($3.3K less than the budget), proceedings sales ($7K less than the budget), and billing and handling ($5K less than the budget). On the expense side of the picture, several related items were less costly than expected. Significant examples include travel volunteers ($3.2K less than the budget), mailing and handling ($1.3K less than the budget), minor printing ($6K less than the budget), distribution ($6.5K less than the budget), and other publicity services ($5.8K less than the budget), for a total of about $17K related to travel and publicity. This trend may be explained by other cheaper and more effective means for publicity that axe now available (using the WWW). Although this is speculation on my part, if this is true then these type of expenses will probably continue to decrease in the future. Other expenses that were less costly than projected include S/C processing charge for SIG ($4.7K less than the budget, don't ask me what this is), and projects ($10K less than the budget was spent). On the other hand, only the production costs ($6.3K above the budget) and uncollected A/R expense ($2.8K above the budget, again, don't ask me what this is) were the only significant expense items that cost more than projected.