2015Q3 Reports: Treasurer

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

July 2015

Graeme Hirst, Treasurer

After several years in which most of our conferences made losses -- some of them quite substantial -- or barely broke even, ACL had a much better year in calendar year 2014, with healthy surpluses at all three major conferences. The difference was largely due to greatly increased sponsorship at our conferences, including an incredibly generous sponsorship of $67,000 for EMNLP 2014 Doha by the Qatari National Research Fund and many large corporate sponsorships for ACL 2014 Baltimore. These surpluses will help to restore our financial reserves, and allow us to increase our spending.

More details are shown in four linked files summarizing our financial results for 2014.

FILE 1: Our balance sheet, which shows a snapshot of our assets and liabilities at 2014-12-31:

On 2014-12-31, we had about $768,000 in cash and investments and another $139,000 in abstract assets such as deposits and advances that we have prepaid for future conferences and the return from the local organizers in Doha of the surplus from EMNLP 2014 (see below). Against this, we had liabilities of $40,000, which includes multi-year memberships and projected expenses of year-end bookkeeping and audit. But this year, we also saw a large decrease in the nominal value of our euro-denominated assets in Malta due (solely) to the increase in the value of our reference currency, the U.S. dollar, against the euro; these losses are unrealized at present, and may be mitigated by future corrections in the value of the dollar and by no increase occurring in expenses that we incur in euros.

In sum, our equity is $866,000, up from $746,000 last year.

A substantial proportion, about 36%, of ACL's equity is in the discretionary subaccounts of chapters and SIGS. NAACL's subaccount balance (NOT taking into account distributions from ACL 2014) is $36,000, and EACL's is €25,000. SIGs collectively have just over $245,000 (NOT taking into account distributions from ACL 2014), of which $159,000 is SIGDAT's and $42,500 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 -- ideally approaching $1M -- 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 or more 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 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 horizontal sums that aren't particularly meaningful (such as the cost of conference bags across all conferences).

Our overall revenue in 2014 was $1.567 million, well up from 2013. Overall expenditure in the year was $1.447 million, giving a net surplus in the calendar year of $120,000. This is not the exact surplus on our operations for the year, because it doesn't take into account various liabilities incurred in 2014 nor payments in 2014 for 2013 liabilities. Nonetheless, these amounts roughly balance, and it is clear that we had a healthy surplus on operations in 2014. After some earlier years of losses, or tiny surpluses, on conferences, this surplus will help restore our assets to a higher level, and give us some breathing space for new initiatives.

FILE 3: Profit and loss statement for conferences:

Note: The "bottom line" figure on this spreadsheet reports only 2014 transactions, and does not take into account deposits on conference facilities and advances to local organizers that were paid in 2013 nor sponsorships that were received in 2013. These are, however, incorporated in the figures below.

(a) The ACL 2014 conference in Baltimore made a surplus of $101,000 (11%) on $913,000 gross revenue. The surplus will be shared with NAACL and on a person-day basis with SIGs that ran workshops at the conference, including SIGNLL for CoNLL. This outcome was largely due to many generous sponsorships, without which the event would have resulted in a substantial loss.

(b) EACL 2014 in Gothenburg had a 14% surplus of €21,000 ($25,000) on revenue of €151,000, which will restore EACL's previously dwindling subaccount.

(c) EMNLP 2014 in Doha had a 12% surplus of $34,000 on revenue of $282,000. This outcome was largely due to QNRF's generous sponsorship, without which the event would have resulted in a substantial loss.

(d) Not shown on the spreadsheet are SIGDIAL 2014 and INLG 2014, which were co-located in Philadelphia. This was a financially complex event, as it was organized through a third party (ETS, the Educational Testing Service) and because SIGDIAL is a semi-independent group. SIGGEN suffered a loss of $5,200 on INLG, and SIGDIAL had a surplus of $9,000.

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

(a) The CL journal, of course, has no direct income any more. The costs, about $54,000 in 2014, are 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 significant costs in 2014; but with the recent addition of a paid editorial assistant, it has now done so.

(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, including from when we "gave away" one-year memberships, or membership extensions, with HLT registration.) We grossed $162,000 in memberships in 2014; the cost of processing and other membership services was about $27,000 (including credit-card fees), leaving a net income of $135,000 in this class.

(d) Miscellaneous income and operating expenses: Income here includes such things as interest on our bank accounts and bonds, and realized gains or losses from changes in the value of currencies. 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 net operating cost was $50,000. Covering these expenses from membership fees leaves us with about $84,000 for the costs of the two 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 organizations. 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 2014, these awards totaled $57,000 in cash and an additional $10,000 in waived conference registration fees for student volunteers.