2020Q1 Reports: Treasurer

ACL's financial health continues to be very strong.

In calendar year 2019, ACL's working assets increased from USD 1,829,535 to USD 2,838,654, a gain of 54%. This reflects both the rapid growth in size of our organization, our increased number of conferences, and their financial success in recent years. This asset base constitutes the combined assets of ACL, its chapters and SIGs, and provides support for our rapidly widening initiatives, increasingly large down payments on our future conferences, and as a buffer for future financial risks.

Unfortunately, the unexpected arrival of 2019 COVID has resulted in potential cancellations for other professional conferences held in spring 2020, and does indeed increase ACL's risk profile, given that over 80% of our income and commitments are conference based. While we are optimistic for the risk profile for our summer 2020 meetings (fortunately there is not one scheduled before July 2020), a primary goal of ACL's leadership in the coming months needs to be to prepare for and mitigate such risks, financial and otherwise.

In addition, a focus of ACL's 2020 financial planning will be to modernize our accounting systems, which have strained under ACL's rapidly increasing size and account's delays. We have solicited and received proposals for improved end-to-end accounting practices, which we hope will allow us to better track the full range of financial metrics important to the organization.