At the meeting the other day when some citizens gathered to discuss possibly revising the law about what to do if a sim is faring very badly financially, Bags made the proposal to make action dependent on a sim failing to take in 75% of its cost for 3 months and for the estate as a whole to fail to take in at least 90% of its cost for 3 months. That's a lot of numbers, so I made the proposal to create a chart and everyone could examine that would keep track of these numbers. So I have. You can see it here:
Now, nothing is as simple as we'd like to make it, so its very important to reveal, and discuss, a number of assumptions that we make in showing a chart like this. Some of them I've recorded right there below the numbers.
1) This chart is intended to show ONLY the ratio, or percentage, between our COST of each sim and the amount of tier that we're collecting on each sim. No other expenses of the community are factored in here.
2) When I say the amount that we're collecting, this is not the ACTUAL amount of money we get each month from each sim. This is the amount of money that each tier box is charging its owner each month, and it can be very different from the amount that owner pays that month. Two things could make this different. One, the owner may be behind in their tier and simply not paying. That isn't shown here. Two, the owner could have already paid for this month, maybe months ago. They don't owe tier, because we already have it. That isn't shown here either.
Why are the differences in Item 2 not too important? Well, let me explain them separately, because they are different.
1) If a citizen is behind on their tier, community policy gives them not very much time to pay up or get out. At any given time the amount of arrears is very very low compared to the total amount collected each month. One of two things happen. Either they pay up, which collects the missing tier, or they get ejected from the parcel and the tierbox becomes empty, meaning it then shows up on our chart. So, yes, the amount we lose to arrearages is not zero, and might be a small adjustment on the chart numbers (maybe sometime I'll figure out what that adjustment is), but its quite small.
2) If a citizen is ahead on their tier, and therefore pays nothing into their tierbox on a given month, thereby causing our income that month in our financial reports to be less, there's nothing lost there! We have their money already. Its in the bank, collected ahead of time. There is no adjustment needed for that situation.
Now I love to visualize data if I can, and this data gave me the perfect opportunity to do so. On the graph, you can easily get a feeling for the overall picture of the financial health of the CDS, since the cost of our sims and the tier revenue we collect are the overwhelming majority of our finances. We are not hugely profitable... there is no question about that. But we are also not hemorrhaging money. We are stably break-even. Sadly, I don't have the tier box data from earlier than last October, so we'll want to watch this chart as I add to it each month going forward. To get more history, we'd need to look at numbers collected in the financial reports, the actual monthly income and expense. That's not available broken out by sim.
Oh, when looking at the graph, do keep in mind that the data flows to the left... the most recent bar is on the left. That's because when I add a new month, I add it on the left, and push all the older data rightward. A chart always opens on the left, and one usually wants to see the most recent info... which will be to the left.
Another thing to keep in mind. These numbers are considerably affected by the exchange rate of L$s to US$s. For the February report that was 251 (in fact the number changes constantly). We pay tier to LL in US$s, but we collect tier from our citizens in L$s, so the exchange rate is central. Recently its varied from about 245 to almost 260, while, at this time, the rates we charge for land do not vary at all. So that exchange rate has an important impact on our profitability, especially since we hover around break-even.
Sudane................................