Yesterday, people were joking in one of the Uni channels that the directors must be getting rich off of all the money we're making in taxes. This led to an impromtu talk about how the Uni manages its finances, and how money is directed to projects. Luckily, I'm the perfect person to give the talk, since I'm the guy in charge of managing our iskflow and generating a monthly budget report. This is a somewhat involved process, as I use an api generated log to review each transaction and wallet journal entry and classify them into the appropriate categories.
I decided to use this blog post to briefly talk about some of the things I covered in that discussion.
What suprised me was that students had a wildly inflated view of how much isk the Uni makes from taxes. To put it in perspective, we'd need students to do a total of 335 hours of level 4 missions at 20m/hr (from bounties and rewards, not salvage loot) in order to meet our bill just for the skillbook wallet program (almost 500m a month). When you start adding in other programs, such as ship replacment or our hangars, the number of hours of mission running gets significantly larger. The Uni does not support that large of a number of people collecting 20m an hour in bounties. A lot of our students are still doing L1, L2, or L3 missions, with a decreasing number for each higher level. While it only takes 335 hours of an experienced level 4 missioner to meet our costs for 1 single program, it would take tens of thousands of hours of l1 or l2 missioners. This just won't cover all our bills.
Our income for the University is only partly based on taxes. Taxes are a somewhat predictable source of income, once you factor in what percentage of time we expect to be at war for a given month. War heavy months are less income, but peaceful months are higher. Over the long term, it averages to be a more constant value. Donations, however, are much more unpredictable. Some months show huge amounts of donations, and others are almost nothing. But, we do depend on donations for a large part of our funding. They help make up the difference that taxes can't cover alone.
Right now, the income/expenses of the University are fairly well balanced, and we are in a sound financial position that I anticipate will continue for some time. I am highly conservative financially, and insure that the university always has a sufficient contigency fund for any emergencies that arise.
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If you're interested in more information, or have specific questions, feel free to comment and ask them in this thread.
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Also, the directors make no direct income from their position. I audit the transactions each month to see what corp cash is being applied to, and question any expenditures that aren't obviously tied to a program. I have yet to see any directors or managers appropriating funds since I took over this duty.
Do the taxes even cover the skillbook program? I'm very surprised if so.
ReplyDeleteTaxes do cover the skillbook program during a typical month. However, they will not cover all our expenses for a given month. Donations cover the rest and any extra is applied to the rainy day fund.
ReplyDeleteThis is because of the sheer number of people we have missioning. While a level 1 mission gives very little in the way of tax (especially when you considered that low amounts are completely untaxed), when you might have hundreds of people running missions each day, it adds up, even if most are lower level missions.
Sounds like a whole lot of work managing all the financials with the amount of stuff that happens in the Uni.
ReplyDeleteThanks :)
It always surprises me that (a) people think that everyone else has way more money than they do and (b) any organisation the size of E-Uni must have /loads/ of money. It's fundamentally constructed of newbies who don't have much money, and who run low-level missions, generating pitiful amounts of tax. There might be a lot of us, but we do like skillbooks and getting our ships blown up. A lot.
ReplyDeleteI think thats just a function of people not truly understanding the demographics of the Uni, and not remembering the iskflow for new eve players. People tend to assume that everyone is like themselves, so a 2-5 year vet may have difficultly internalizing what the money situation is for true new players.
ReplyDeleteYummy Tears here,
ReplyDeleteYeah, I noticed exactly what you are talking about Azmodeus just today in the E-Uni channel. I posted a message that I had just sold roughly 60M in salvage - and that it was roughly a weeks worth of salvage. I did this to inspire newer players that typically make up the bulk of activity in that channel to salvage themselves and reap in the ISK rewards it generates.
In turn, some player (approximately 4 months old) mentioned "Oh, well running level 4 Missions is worth 50M/hour" as a counter to my statement.
I know lots of people CLAIM to make 50M/hour missioning and certainly some do, but it's not the norm I don't believe. Also, mostly speaking the channel is made up of players who are months away from earning that level of ISK/hour from missioning.
I highly doubt anyone in the Uni is making 50m an hour running L4s in high-sec. I just can't see that being a possible average for solo missioning.
ReplyDeleteNow its possible that someone, somewhere, using an officer fit ship, the exact right missions, and a second account pulled in 50m, but thats 25m per account if they did it.
Yummy Tears again,
ReplyDeleteExactly Azmodeus. I was mostly just reinforcing your point in that people forget quite often the demographic that E-Uni is generally serving which is the newer players (like myself) among the Eve population.
Newer players are definitely not pulling in a great amount of ISK. I'm currently doing L3's in a T1 Guns/T2 Tank BC and pulling roughly 6M/hour or so missioning/salvaging. That's just a guess and I've definitely not graphed it out or anything. Of that 6M, I'd say roughly 3-4M or so is taxed maybe, meaning I generate roughly 225k-300k in taxes per hour.
Definitely not astronomical whatsoever.