Statement of Activity Comparisons 2024-2025

This section contains the Statement of Activity Comparison, also called a Profit and Loss Statement, of the Plone Foundation for the fiscal years 2024 and 2025.

Introduction

The year 2025 brought many challenges to the financial stability of the Plone Foundation. The duties and responsibilities of the role of Treasurer were not clearly defined or documented. To help set expectations for this role, Steve Piercy was appointed in July to fill the vacant position of Treasurer on a volunteer interim basis with a one-year commitment.

"If it isn't documented, it's broken" applies equally to both software and financial systems. Documentation of both existing and newly created processes was one of the top three priorities. Second was to make financial statements and budgets transparent and useful to the Plone Foundation Membership and Board. Third was to establish and maintain continuity in the Foundation for both the role of Treasurer and financial reporting and legal compliance. Following these top priorities, numerous initiatives commenced to better manage, stabilize, and grow the Foundation's financial situation.

The highlights of the achievements include the following items.

• Restored access to a savings account paying a trivial 0.01% in interest and holding a majority of the Foundation's assets. Promptly transferred all of its funds into the Foundation's checking account at a different banking institution and closed the savings account.
• Established interest bearing bank accounts to hold funds, and transferred assets to earn a return on deposits.
• Began accepting and holding euros for Plone Foundation sponsorship and for reimbursement of expenses to eliminate currency conversion fees.
• Started using Wise for all foreign currency transactions, invoices, receipt of both euros and US dollars, and any other transactions to minimize usurious fees imposed by PayPal (sometimes up to 5% of the transaction) and Chase (sometimes up to 3% of the transaction, plus other fees). Wise fees are typically less than 1% of the total transaction amount, and often free.
• Began accounting in euros, as well as US dollars.
• Updated the chart of accounts to improve transparency of where money comes in and goes out, and properly categorizing income and expenses. This had the additional benefits of making it possible to generate accurate financial statements on demand and making the annual budget process more realistic and certain.
• Established a well-documented reimbursement process to reduce the time between a request for and receipt of payment from weeks or months down to hours or days.
• Identified unused services that were still being paid, adjusted billing plans to an appropriate level, verified actively used services for payment, and cancelled unused services, reducing expenses and maintaining continuity of services. This is an ongoing process.
• Applied for grants from the NLnet Foundation and FLOSS/fund for the development, documentation, and accessibility of Plone.
• Coordinated with the Sponsorship Team for invoicing sponsors and receiving sponsorship funds, ensuring accurate and timely communication.
• Established a virtual post office box that can be moved to wherever it's convenient for the future Treasurer, replacing the physical US Postal Service one in Indiana.
• Established a virtual phone number to handle texts for verification of time-based one-time passwords (TOTP) for websites and services that only support texting. Thus, for the future Treasurer, they won't have to use their personal phone number for several dozen vendors.

Income

• Donations through the GitHub Sponsors program brought in $7,733, an increase of 92% from 2024. Notably, one donor gave $1,000, which in turn led us to discover the FLOSS/fund for potential grants.
• Foundation Sponsorship brought in $25,202, an increase of 31% from 2024.
• Google Summer of Code stipends brought in $1,500, no change from 2024.
• Plone Conference 2025 Sponsorship brought in $33,020. This amount is not comparable to 2024, because every conference is managed differently, usually where the organizer assumes the financial risk or reward. For 2025, PyCon Finland joined the conference, which also helped boost sponsorship revenue. The majority of these funds, however, were used to reimburse the expenses incurred by the host, the Unversity of Jyväskylä. The remaining balance could not be retained by the university, since it's not permitted to make a profit, so it was retained by the Foundation.
• Non Profit Income of $168 represents payments from businesses who were still paying for the now free Provider listing on plone.org. These businesses were redirected to GitHub Sponsors to make donations or became Foundation Sponsors.
• Gross Profit was $67,623, an increase of 33% from 2024.

Expenses

• In 2024, Bank Fees were $1,908. In 2025, Bank Fees were split into three subcategories: Bank Fees were $649, Currency Exchange Fees were $1, and PayPal Fees were $288, for a total of $738, a reduction of 61%. Neither PayPal nor Chase will be used for making transactions that involve a foreign currency exchange, which should further reduce money management fees.
• Domain name services were $360 in 2025, down from $539 in 2024, a reduction of 33%. This was primarily due to the elimination of unused domain names.
• Some Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024 expenses were paid in both fiscal years 2024 and 2025, due to Plone Conference being held close to the end of 2024 and the ensuing holidays. The total GSoC expense for 2025 was $5,569, covering the expenses of two participants each for 2024 and 2025.
• Hosting Services includes servers that host Plone websites, including plone.org, plone.de, plone.social, three demo sites, community.plone.org, documentation, training, website statistics, and Jenkins. It also includes a transactional mail service for plone.org, and three five-year old unsupported and unmaintained Plone in a Box images. Hosting Services was $7,813 in 2025, and $7,816 in 2024, for a negligible difference.
• Every ten years, the Foundation must renew its trademark with the European Union, United Kingdom, and United States. In 2025, the Plone trademark was renewed in the first two jurisdictions, for an expense of $2,500. The US trademark will be renewed in 2026.
• Legal and Professional fees were $814 in 2025, and $561 in 2024, an increase of 45%. This amount is expected to increase with the hiring of a bookkeeper in the second half of 2026 to take over the routine financial tasks currently performed by the Interim Treasurer, freeing that role to focus on strategy instead of "counting beans".
• Legal services include a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) for filing our annual federal tax return and reviewing our books.
• It also includes having a registered agent in the state of Delaware where the Plone Foundation is incorporated. The registered agent provides a legal entity for the Foundation, helps file our annual state franchise tax return, and requests a statement of good standing from the state of Delaware when the Foundation needs to update authorized signers on its bank accounts and for other legal requirements.
• The federal tax returns for fiscal years 2022 and 2023 had not been filed until January 2025, and the one for fiscal year 2024 was filed late in November 2025 because of a missing unpaid invoice from the accountant. When the Interim Treasurer discovered in November 2025 that the tax return for 2024 had not been filed, this was promptly resolved by paying the accountant, who immediately file the required tax return. This could have been a serious negative impact to the Plone Foundation. According to the United States tax agency, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), if an organization does not file a required return or files late, the IRS may assess penalties. In addition, if an organization does not file as required for three consecutive years, it automatically loses its tax-exempt status (emphasis added). To avoid this, all annual tasks have been entered into the Treasurer's calendar as recurring events with several notifications beginning a month before the deadline.
• Marketing/Business Development was $3,601 in 2025, and $4,522 in 2024, a reduction of 20%. The vast majority of this expense was for Google AdWords. This was caught in October 2025 and eliminated going forward.
• Other Conference/Events was $966 in 2025 for supporting Plone Tagung 2025. There was no expense for this category in 2024.
• Plone Conference 2024 and 2025 expenses showed up in fiscal year 2025, and aren't comparable year over year. Plone Conference 2024 expense in 2025 was $573 and Plone Conference 2025 expense was $20,117. The Plone Conference 2025 yielded a net profit of $12,903 for the Plone Foundation.
• Postage & Delivery was $237 in 2025, and $194 in 2024, an increase of 22%. This was due to a price increase by the US Postal Service for physical post office boxes. This will be reduced further in 2026 from the transition to a virtual PO box.
• Software Licenses are now broken into three subcategories to better track who is responsible for each product. Although the initiative to "right-size" plans for software license brought in considerable savings, there was an overall increase. Total expenses for Software Licenses was $4,590, an increase of 11% over 2024.
• Board was $708 in 2025, a slight increase of 2% over 2024.
• Marketing was $3,072, an increase of 13% over 2024, primarily due to taking ownership of the social media management application from a generous sponsor who previously donated its value to the Foundation.
• Office was $810, an increase of 15%, exclusively due to the price increase of our online accounting software.
• Sprints were $15,712, an increase of 52% over 2024, reflecting the dramatic increase in activity in the development of Plone and the delayed reimbursement of Salamina 2024 paid in fiscal year 2025. See the Statement of Activity Comparison for details of each sprint.
• Travel & Lodging Stipends were broken into three subcategories in 2025 to better track activity of each team, Marketing Lead, Release Management, and Treasurer. The Treasurer stipend was new for 2025. These stipends help defray the costs for key individuals to participate in person at events to promote and develop Plone. The total for 2025 in this category was $11,185, an increase of 35% over 2024, primarily due to an increase in activity in participation at sprints and conferences and more frequent releases.
• Marketing Lead was $1,644, a decrease of 26% over 2024.
• Release Management was $8,041, a increase of 32% over 2024, primarily due to more frequent releases and focused development of Plone.
• Treasurer was $1,500.
• Utilities were $51, a new expense in 2025, providing a phone number for all future Treasurers to use for texts of TOTPs to access account.
• The total for Expenses was $75,027, an increase of 6% over 2024.

Other Income and Expenses

Other Income is interest earned on deposits held in bank accounts, and brought in $124. This was a decrease of 27% from 2024, due to the transition from a low interest bearing account, then to the Foundation's primary checking account, and finally to higher interest bearing accounts, once they could be established.

There were no Other Expenses, so Net Other Income was $124.

Summary

The Plone Foundation had a Net Operating Loss of -$7,404, and a Net Loss of -$7,280 in 2025, both an improvement of 63% over fiscal year 2024.

Although there remains some due diligence to perform on a few expenses, management of costs in fiscal year 2025 yielded savings to the Foundation of approximately $6,000. In 2026, revenues for sponsorships, donations, and interest are expected to increase further. To monitor progress, the Treasurer will generate quarterly financial statements to share with the Marketing Team and for the Board to review.

Respectfully Submitted,

Steve Piercy, Interim Treasurer

Contact the Board at board@plone.org with comments or questions.