WICE 2025 Finance Report

Bonjour à tous,

Please find the 2025 Finance Report at the bottom of the page. There several things about it I would like to discuss. 

First, under "Revenues," as I alluded to in the 2025 Annual Report, 15% of our revenues came from donations and fundraising rather than membership fees or programs. This is almost certainly unsustainable, and the next board will closely examine how to achieve a better balance.

Under "Expenses-Administrative," we spent €18,040 on "Services." Despite having given up full-time staff in 2022, there is still a need for certain administrative and IT support services. The principal way we address this is by contracting those services out to several auto-entrepreneurs. In the same category, €1,200 went to hire a former librarian to create and implement an information architecture and file naming conventions for our online file system. This has made conducting day-to-day business significantly easier.

Also in "Expenses-Administrative," we spent €2,039.71 for "Virtual Office." This covered the cost of the many working coffees our volunteers had over the year. Although we gave up the office in 2022, we still need to hold in-person meetings to discuss and plan WICE activities.  We think it would be unfair to ask our volunteers to meet at a café to do this, and then have them pay out of their own pockets. Former WICE President Carol Allen once said that the secret to running WICE is having lots of cups of coffee with lots of people. And if you do the math, you'll see that lots of cups of coffee went into making WICE run this past year.

Just below "Virtual Office" is "Volunteer Development." This covers several things. We provide budgets to our volunteer Team Leaders for quarterly team lunches and monthly coffees in order to foster teamwork and camaraderie in their respective teams. And, the fact is that many people become volunteers specifically to meet other people. In the absence of an office where people can meet, this is one way we've addressed that. The "Volunteer Development" category also includes the cost of allowing volunteers to attend the monthly apéros for free. We give volunteers a 20% discount on any paid WICE courses they take, and next year we will try to factor the cost of that in, too.

Finally, in "Expenses - Cost of Sales", the €3,853.35 is almost entirely from the monthly apéros. We lose money there, in part because we let new members and volunteers attend for free, and probably in part because we only charge €10 to others who attend. That may change next year. 

Ideally, we would show the current and previous years' income statements for comparison. However, we are not doing so this year for two reasons.

• First, the 2024 Paris Writers Workshop took place in June, and there were significant expenses associated with it that both crossed fiscal year boundaries and that also involved slightly complex currency conversions. The results were a tangle of numbers that even our spreadsheets found confusing.

• Second, we haven’t yet had the right mix of accounting expertise, fiscal policy-making acumen, and reporting skills to establish and apply consistent accounting categories across the board. Several changes in the Finance Department over the past year led to some expenses being categorized differently by different people, which even I find confusing. We’re confident that next year's finance team will bring more clarity and consistency, allowing for a clean, side-by-side comparison in 2026 and beyond.

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

Rick Jones, President