2014Q3 Reports: Treasurer

Treasurer's Report to ACL Executive for year ended 2013-12-31 June 2014

Graeme Hirst, Treasurer

The ACL bookkeeping for calendar year 2013 is not yet complete, and this report contains only interim results. Normally, my report (like the ACL conference itself) would be given in late July or early August. I have no reason to expect the final figures to be greatly different from those reported here. The areas of greatest uncertainty are memberships (due to problems in getting coherent membership payment data from PlugNPay) and final conference results (due to the remaining task of allocating expenses and income for SIG events). Attached are four files summarizing these interim results.

FILE 1: Our interim balance sheet, which shows a snapshot of our assets and liabilities at 2013-12-31:

On 2013-12-31, we had about $756,000 in cash and equities and another $75,000 in abstract assets such as deposits and advances that we have prepaid for future conferences. Against this, we had liabilities of $97,000. This number includes multi-year memberships and money owed to The MIT Press for Computational Linguistics (see below).

Thus our net equity is just under $744,000, up from $673,000 last year; ideally, it would be substantially even higher.(*)

A substantial proportion, about 35%, of ACL's equity is in the subaccounts of chapters and SIGS. NAACL's subaccount balance (NOT taking into account the conference results below) is $42,000, and EACL's is €7950. SIGs collectively have just over $200,000 (NOT taking into account the conference results below), of which $124,000 is SIGDAT's and $39,000 is SIGDIAL's. Other SIGs have balances ranging from a few thousand dollars down to zero or less (SIGPARSE has a $2700 deficit).

(*) We need to maintain very substantial cash reserves and equity for three reasons: (a) We need to be able to survive disastrous losses on conferences, perhaps two in the same year. (b) When we sign contracts with hotels and convention centers for $100-400K of conference services, these businesses are extending us a very large amount of credit (even though we also pay big deposits), so we undergo credit checks which, obviously, we need to have sufficient assets to pass. (c) Even with this credit, we still have to pay large deposits for many venues well in advance of any revenue from the event.

FILE 2: Our interim overall profit and loss statement (technically so-called even though we are a non-profit organization and therefore have surpluses, not profits):

Note that some lines on this sheet are misleading because they are horizontal sums that aren't particularly meaningful (such as the sum across the conferences at Sofia, Atlanta, and Seattle of the costs of each component of the banquets).

Our overall revenue in 2013 was $1.334 million, which is roughly the same as in 2012, even though we had one conference fewer. Overall expenditure in the year was $1.263 million, giving a net surplus in the calendar year of $71,000. However, this is not a surplus on our operations for the year, because it does not take into account various unpaid bills, such as what we owe The MIT Press for the CL journal (see below), nor payments in 2013 for 2012 debts.

FILE 3: Profit and loss statement for conferences:

(a) The ACL 2013 conference in Sofia made a modest (percentage-wise) surplus of $22,000 on a $560,000 event. The surplus will be shared on a person-day basis with SIGs that sponsored events at the conference, notably SIGNLL for CoNLL.

(b) NAACL 2013 in Atlanta made an even more modest surplus of about $5600 on revenue of $357,000. The surplus will be shared on a person-day basis with SIGs that sponsored events at the conference, notably SIGSEM and SIGLEX for *SEM.

(c) EMNLP 2013 in Seattle had a small deficit of $4700 on revenue of $226,000.

FILE 4: Profit and loss statement for the journals, membership, and operations:

(a) The CL journal, of course, has no income any more. The costs, about $53,000 in 2013, are supposed to be covered by membership fees and surpluses from the ACL conference. They comprise the cost of the editor's part-time assistant and services (copyediting, typography, online distribution) by The MIT Press.

(b) Our new journal, TACL, does not appear in the spreadsheet as it had not yet started incurring costs in 2013; but it has recently started to do so, with the addition of a paid editorial assistant.

(c) Membership is required for attendance at any ACL conference, and many people do not pay for memberships any more except when registering for their first conference each year. (Also, we still have many multiple-year memberships current from past years when we "gave away" one-year memberships, or membership extensions, with HLT registration.) We grossed $154,000 in memberships in 2013; the cost of processing and other membership services was about $14,300, leaving a net income of $139,500 in this class.

(d) Miscellaneous income and operating expenses: Income here includes such things as interest on our bank accounts and bonds, and unrealized gains (which in some other years have been losses) from changes in the value of the euro against the U.S. dollar. Expenses include office rent and utilities, insurance, bookkeeping and accounting, Business Manager's time not allocated to other specific classes, and the cost of maintaining the ACL Portal. Our operating cost was $54,300. Covering these expenses from membership fees leaves us with about $85,000 for the costs of the journals and our other activities.

(e) Not shown on this spreadsheet, because they cut across a number of categories, are scholarships, sponsorships, and other awards. These include awards to students to attend conferences, the waiver of registration fees at conferences for student volunteers, and contributions to the cost of events organized by other CL and NLP groups. These awards are made by the chapters from their subaccounts, by central ACL through the Walker Fund, and by the organizers of student research workshops at conferences from funds that flow to us specifically for this purpose from sources such as the U.S. National Science Foundation and some of the conference sponsors (and hence may appear as conference income and expenses). In 2013, these awards totaled $49,300 in cash and $xxxx [figure not yet available] in forgone conference income from fee waivers for volunteers.

OTHER MATTERS:

Investment policy: Although ACL has significant amounts of reserve funds in short-term and long-term investments, we do not have any formal written investment policy. Rather, the Treasurer, European Treasurer, and Business Manager have simply used an ad hoc commonsense approach, which is not necessarily optimal. In particular, we are not at present getting good returns for our U.S. reserve accounts. And our specific investment goals and degree of risk-tolerance are not codified.

This situation needs to be improved; we need a written investment policy. I have studied a number of model policies for U.S. non-profit organizations, but none adequately took into account our needs as a de facto international organization. I will continue to work on the issue and hope to soon have a draft policy for consideration by the Executive Board.