WICE 2024 Financial Report

Bonjour à tous,

We are, by convention, showing the current year's income statement along with the previous year's income statement for comparison. Although last year there were a number of factors that made a side-by-side comparison challenging, this year we are much closer to comparing apples to apples. And this year we had our bi-annual Paris Writers Workshop, which we broke that out separately so that you could see the apples-to-apples part of the comparison.

Standard WICE Operations

For standard WICE operations—excluding Paris Writers Workshop—we had a net operating loss of -€893.36. This is a significant change from last year, and due in large part to the following:

Our overall service expenditures also went up significantly.  The cost of the new website design is included here, but we are also relying more heavily now on outside consultants and services for technology and administrative issues.

Finance fees went up a bit due to the inclusion of Stripe as a payment method.

The large miscellaneous fees in cost of sales is a result of moving our monthly apéros into the Social Activities program, and consequently their costs into cost of sales.

Two years ago we shut down our office and stopped using salaried staff. This resulted in a large saving in last year's report. We realized, however, that we still need something like office support, and we still need human support. We have created two new expense categories to account for that:

• Virtual Office: This is money spent when we must have working meetings in cafés. This is primarily for the beverages we are expected to buy when sitting in a café.

• Volunteer Engagement: This is discussed more in the President's letter. We are committed to fostering camaraderie and esprit de corps in our volunteer community, and this expense category will cover lunches and other volunteer expenses that fall into that.
  

Finally, once again we received a $5,000 donation from the Franco-American Benevolent Society. That cheque has not cleared the American bank yet, and the amount in "Donations" is an estimate based on current conversion rates. On the other hand, last year we received a one-time anonymous donation of €1,000 for establishing a new conversation group venue, and that added an extraordinary revenue item that is not present this year.

There are no detailed records of the 2022 Paris Writers Workshop finances other than the total income and total cost of sales, so a side-by-side comparison is impossible.

But we do have the details from this year's Paris Writers Workshop, and overall there was a large enough net gain that WICE had an overall net gain of €11,644.78.

That said, payments for American instructors have not gone through yet, and the cost of sales for instructors (and subsequent results) are estimates based on current conversion rates. 

Summary

Two key numbers to look at are (1) programs revenue, which has almost doubled since last year, and (2) membership revenue, which has gone up about 25%. These both say that WICE is doing a lot more now than we were last year. In growing at this rate, we will necessarily be spending more on support: technical, administrative, and possibly financial. As steward's of your money, we will continue to do our best to spend it wisely and with achieve results that fully support the WICE mission.

As a final note, this report is not based on a 3rd party audit, and should not be considered official at this point.

Nathalie Rogers, Treasurer