Budget

[dbrgn]

Blocks #9.

What expenses can we expect?

If we can't get the room for free (it would probably be easier not having to target a break-even):

• Location rent (including cleaning and other expenses)
• Technical equipment (sound, adapters, etc)
• Printing costs for flyers, posters, etc
• Coffee and food during breaks
• Social event (if we decide to do one)
  • Beer
  • Catering
• Name badges / Lanyards
• Staff shirts
• Drinks for speakers and helpers
• Maybe free entry for speakers and helpers
• Maybe travel expenses for speakers
• Varia

[dbrgn]

How many people should we allow? I think we could do our budget based on 200 and allow up to around 250. That should be possible in the Aula.

[chiesax]

I am not sure you already did this, but could we provide a more or less detailed list of last year expenses, this would give us a more quantitative idea...

[chiesax]

@sfkeller could you give us an estimate for the location rent?

[sfkeller]

Aula (incl. Aula Foyer e.g. for Apéro) 600.-; plus 120.- "Hauswart/Bühnenmeister"; plus Beamer 150.-. More Aula Office infrastructure (Micro)? => plus 250.-. I hope I did not forge s'thing: More rooms?

[chiesax]

Reported from last year budget...

Covered

costs

Venue (sponsored by HSR)
Catering (we're doing our own)
Social event excluding beer (sponsored by Beekeeper)
Shirts and Lanyards (sponsored by Divio)
Lanyard card sleeves (sponsered by Seantis)
Microphones (@dbrgn could borrow some for free)
Website (Github)
Helpers / Speakers (no reimbursements)

Open costs

Coffee / Snacks: ~900 CHF (about 120 * 7.50 CHF according to @sfkeller)
Two Cash boxes: 44 CHF
Beer: 200 CHF (160 bottles * 1.28 CHF, free delivery)
Thick paper for lanyard cards: 10 CHF
Water for speakers: 10 CHF

Unsure

Cleaning staff: could there be additional costs for cleaning, @sfkeller?
Lanyard card printing: could we print them at HSR, @sfkeller?

Income

Entrance fees: 1100 CHF (110 * 10, speakers and HSR students don't need to pay)

Result

With the current data: 1164 CHF - 1100 CHF = -64 CHF

[chiesax]

What about HSR students tickets prices? Do they get free/reduced fee entry even if we pay the room?

[chiesax]

@sfkeller In case we are paying the room, do you think we need some sort of insurance?

[sfkeller]

There exists already an insurance at the university. Regarding HSR students tickets: I'd suggest to give discount to all students (at least HSR); that was a suggestion by our financial officer. How much this discount is, can you (the organizing committee) decide.

[dbrgn]

We could adjust student prices (for all universities) so that they only cover the food costs, but don't account for room and material costs. 50% could work. What do you think? We should have enough room.

Could we also offer company tickets? For a company, 50-100 CHF is peanuts. But it would allow us to give out regular and student tickets even cheaper. See #9.

[jakeret]

Having different prices makes the registration process and setting up the budget harder. At least last year we tried to keep everything simple and stupid

[dbrgn]

What about this (without having calculated it through):

• Student 10 CHF
• Regular 20 CHF
• Company 50 CHF

All of this for pre-order. On-site: +10 CHF.

We'd have to calculate how much money we'd get from that in worst-case and best-case scenarios. And then see how much is missing.

[ccdesales]

Don't forget that for company tickets we need to have actual invoices, as they're used for tax purposes.

[dbrgn]

Would that be hard to do? I have a LaTeX template that we could adjust if someone requests it. Don't think we would need to provide invoices by default.

[chiesax]

How do we handle early bird tickets?

[chiesax]

Should we increase the price if people pay on-site, or just open for on-site payments later (like one month before the conf), or both?

[dbrgn]

What about allowing pre-payments until 2 weeks before the event with the reduced price, and then only allowing on-site payments? This way all pre-payments will be processed in time.

[chiesax]

Meaning that reservations for on-site payments open 2 weeks before the event, with the same mechanism as last year?

[dbrgn]

That is my suggestion, yes. What do you think? This will also reduce the number of people that sign up and don't come to the event.

[chiesax]

Sounds good to me...

[chiesax]

... hopefully people will prefer to spend some time to make pay us online, rather than speculating they can still get ticket on-site...

[chiesax]

What I mean is that we could also consider an extra charge for paying on-site (like 5 CHF).

[dbrgn]

Yes, that's what I suggested in my (edited) comment above :) 10 CHF would be a benefit in that we don't need that many coins but can use paper money instead. But 5 CHF would be OK too (although it's not much of an incentive to pre-pay anymore.)

We could also offer payment via bitcoin through https://bitpay.com/, it's really simple to set up. They send the transferred money in fiat currency to a SEPA bank account. But @chiesax would have to decide whether he wants to support something like that.

[chiesax]

10 CHF is even better, will give a stronger motivation to pre-pay. As for bitconins, lets have it as a nice-to-have feature. Lets see how fast Postfinance is setting up our account before...

[dbrgn]

Cool!

Bitpay free account offers up to 30 transactions per month and up to 1000$ daily. I think that should be enough for us. Business would cost 1% transaction fee (still much lower than credit cards around 2-3%).