Ok, folks, please... this thread is already confusing enough, we really don't need to discuss personal relationships in the middle of a budget discussion 
I'm a bit concerned about the discrepancy between Rose's claimed revenues of AA and the published reports which tell a different story. Please note that I'm not concerned if Al Andaluz, standing alone by itself, is profitable or not; this would like asking if a random collection of sims out of the CDS are profitable by themselves. Some are, some are not; what is important is the overall picture.
Overall, thus, the merged CDS/AA are profitable, and that's what matters for me as a RA member of a merged CDS/AA. The Treasurer's numbers validate that statement, and I believe that Rose's own numbers will tell the same. Just the amounts are not the same!
So, separately taken, there has to be a confusion of some sort. From the very beginning I was told that the Treasury would get all tier from all AA residents, and that because of pre-payments, we would have to wait a whole year until we could have an idea if the AA sims, by themselves, were profitable or not. While I would be hard-pressed to accept such a statement from any other organisation in the world, non-profit or not, the CDS/AA is special to me, so I have let it pass
A year is almost over, and now we're told that the Treasurer doesn't have access to the whole picture, and never did: there are other sorts of revenues, there is pre-merger revenue that has come somehow into the Treasury but was not properly accounted for, and there is money from pre-payed months in the future (e.g. for August and so forth) that is skewing the results. That's a financial nightmare!
Furthermore, I hear now that apparently Rose is able to click on a button and see exactly how much money AA is making, with no fuss at all, and that the Hippo system is a wonderful system that can get that data easily without problems. The site for Hippo certainly confirms that, although I have no idea if AA has the web-based or the in-world-server-based version. So why doesn't the Treasurer have access to it?
I do know how the old land management system worked; I have no idea how the current one works, but the Hippo guys were still playing with dolls while we had a fully-featured system specifically developed and tailored for the peculiarities of the CDS; it's a custom-made solution just for us. While I'm fully prepared to believe that the Hippo guys have a far more advanced product, I can only say that "our" product has never failed to provide the Treasurer, the Executive, or the RA with accurate data. And we cannot manage the CDS financially without accurate numbers. It's impossible — it just leads to speculation, name-calling, and wild guessing. You cannot manage an organisation with that! Specially one organisation that (sadly, perhaps) has to be financially self-sustainable and cannot rely on sponsors to maintain it.
So I would kindly request that we put a stop to this whole "number guessing" discussion. Does that require special legislation? NL 5-5 is quite detailed and should make all the above crystal clear. Let me quote the relevant information from there:
In order that the City present fairly and with full disclosure its financial position and results of operations, the Treasurer is responsible for establishing and maintaining an effective accounting system that will result in the:
Identification and recording of all valid transactions.
Description on a timely basis of the type of transaction in sufficient detail to permit proper classification of the transaction for financial reporting.
Measurement of the transaction's value in a manner that permits recording of its monetary value in the financial statements.
Determination of the time period in which the transaction occurred to permit recording of the transaction in the proper accounting period.
Proper presentation of the transaction and related disclosures in the financial statements.
I'm sorry, but any attempt to obfuscate the way the Treasurer collects data to present those statements or a refusal to present the Treasurer with full records of all transactions, are, for me, serious enough to ask the help of the SC to sort things out. Reversely, if the Treasurer is not publishing the reports or deliberately omitting information is a serious offense!
All this is just because the RA also has a duty to oversee this procedure and propose measures to get it working properly; the Executive cannot work in a vacuum, without any idea of how much money we make, and the RA cannot establish priorities based on incomplete numbers or vague allegations that we don't have access to all numbers. I have repeatedly seen the claim that all numbers were presented to the Treasurer, but that some things are simply "not visible" and thus cannot be put on the reports we get every month from the Treasury. Now I hear that some numbers are not even being passed to the Treasurer, or that the Treasurer is misreporting the numbers she has!
Please also note, again, that I'm not worried if the AA sims generate enough revenue to cover for their costs. Part of the philosophical concepts behind the CDS is the ability to run it successfully so that a surplus can be generated to aid other similar-minded projects to become financially self-sufficient, too. Of course we have, so far, only invested in the CDS sims; I consider that the "investment" in helping to cover tier costs for AA during the past year are definitely part of the CDS' purpose — yes, I see us as a "charity" sometimes, a very special charity that gives out money to groups of residents wishing to become self-governing, democratic entities, but need a gentle (financial) push in order to achieve self-sustainability. That's no problem at all for me. It just means that the RA might need to propose changes for that to happen (some of you might remember how long we've tinkered with Neufreistadt to get it self-sustainable as well; it still has far too much public land IMHO); some of those measures might get approved, some might not, and some might just be implemented by the Executive without need of specific legislation.
But that means that it's crucial for us — all of us, not just the RA — to know that the reports we get from the Treasurer are, indeed, accurate. If they're not, we need to know why they are not accurate. And then we have to see what to fix. I hate to blame technology, but if the Hippo rental system works for (allegedly) 70,000 SL residents, it should work for us, too. If not, we'll kick that system out of our land and use our own, which at least has provided accurate and faithful data for the past 4 years, no matter how obsolete it might seem. As much as I love technology, I have no qualms in discarding bright and shiny hyper-sophisticated techie things for old, outdated, but proven methods with a good track record of several years. In this I have the opposite opinion of all people who love the Hippo system. The point is, I don't know if we can ever get proper reports from it or not, and nobody seems to be able to tell me so. I guess I could buy one and try it for myself but I'm afraid of what I might find out...
Nevertheless I think that I'm missing the point here somewhere. Can someone explain to me why we can't get accurate data from the AA Hippo system, in simple English? Please don't tell me that it's too hard to deal with pre-payments! I'm sure that this is listed on the system somewhere, e.g. who paid in advance, how many months were paid in advance, and for which parcel! How hard can that be to track pre-payments down? Why do we have to take a whole year to get that data?
I'm sorry. I've been a defender of this "double" system for the past year, even though it seemed completely awkward and backwards to me. I let my peers persuade me that we could make the rental system and the overall accounting work in spite of all the quirks. I've been reading the financial reports and taken them as reflecting the reality of our finances, and making decisions — or participating in the decision process whenever possible — because I was assuming a reality based on the Treasurer reports. As the recent discussion on the Finance Commission shows, we really have no clue, just assumptions, on how much the CDS/AA earns (and a question was even raised on how much it spends on the sims! Apparently not even the values for that were right, but had to be corrected after the merger took place...). Different people have different assumptions.
Gah! This is even worse than figuring out how much Greece really owes
It's time to put a stop to this.
