Our Profit & Loss Statement for FY2019
/As part of our commitment to transparency in podcasting, One thing we’d like to do is provide people with a look at our finances. Money is not a thing that is discussed overly often (except when we ask you to give us yours!), so I thought it was worth sitting down and providing a look at our first year’s finances as an actual business. This is information we have to manage anyway, because as a business, we need to complete tax returns, so the question is mostly just around getting information in the right format.
A few caveats before we go right into it. Firstly, this information only covers our costs from our inception as a business on July 1st, 2018, to the end of the financial year on June 30th, 2019. This statement does not go into details on who we’ve paid and how much, and just shows information on general categories.
Secondly, because a significant portion of our income is in US Dollars (and much of that is left as USD in our PayPal account), we use split-currency accounting. In effect, anything that doesn’t pass through our AU Dollar accounts stays on the sheet as USD (Our accountant does the relevant work to convert that to AUD for tax purposes).
| Category | AUD | USD |
|---|---|---|
| Merchandise Sales | $235.50 | |
| Patreon | $1,513.36 | |
| Event Sales | $215.57 | |
| Donations | $138.00 | $10.00 |
| Total | $589.07 | $1,523.36 |
So, we have a few revenue streams - Merchandise from the Love and Luck Store, our Patreon Income (by far our largest income source), ticket sales from events (which doesn’t happen often), and Donations. That last one probably needs some additional explanation - we have a PayPal.me address that we don’t advertise, but does get promoted by others every so often. Payments made through this system aren’t for anything, so they’re included separately. In tax terms they’re not actually taxable income for us here.
Also conspicuously missing here would be the Kickstarter funding for Season 2, but that has a very good reason - that income came through to us in February 2019 - well before the start of the financial year, and before we were set up as a business (before that point, we were still firmly in hobby territory).
| Category | AUD | USD |
|---|---|---|
| Studio Charges | $99.20 | |
| Actors | $1,650.00 | |
| Other Crew | $900.00 | |
| Website and Hosting | $329.95 | |
| Advertising | $29.70 |
Because Love and Luck is entirely a local production, we actually don’t have any costs paid solely in USD - those costs have to go through our AUD Accounts. Now, a few things to note here, is that this table doesn’t cover all of our Season 2 costs, although it covers a significant proportion of them. Recording for Season 2 actually started before the start of the financial year, and continued well after it. You can see that our studio costs were actually really cheap (thanks to our studio dropping their rates this financial year). So, our biggest costs (as they always are!) are us paying our actors and crew, followed by our web hosting and podcast hosting costs.
| Category | AUD | USD |
|---|---|---|
| Studio Charges | $121.80 | |
| Actors | $775.00 | $98.04 |
| Writers | $645.00 | $52.74 |
| Website and Hosting | $190.08 | |
| Sound Effects and Music | $15.21 | $46.20 |
Again, we see here that by far the largest cost for Seabrooke during the financial year were for the people we’re paying - our Writers and Actors - followed by our webhosting costs. The “Office Supplies” component of this is actually pretty small - it’s just the costs for printing physical copies of the script for use in-studio. As a note, our studio costs continued to be pretty small this time around - that figure is for around 16 hours of studio time.
| Category | AUD | USD |
|---|---|---|
| Actors | $20.00 | |
| Sound Designer | $350.00 | |
| Total | $370.00 |
Memorial was one of the shorts that we released earlier this year as part of Passer Vulpes Presents. The costs on this one was solely people-based, as we recorded actors in our front room. This was our first time hiring a sound designer, the amazing Maize Wallan, which was where most of the costs for the production went to.
| Category | AUD | USD |
|---|---|---|
| Pinecast Hosting | $63.93 | |
| Conferences - Tix & Hotel | $921.83 | |
| Awards - Tix, Travel, Hotel & Entry | $847.87 | |
| Midsumma Registration | $235.00 | |
| Bank and Paypal Fees | $23.36 |
Finally, here are our costs that aren’t specifically connected to any of our productions. There’s a few big ticket items here, so let’s go through them quickly. Pinecast is our podcast host for several of our productions, so the cost goes here. Conference costs are specifically for our trip to Audiocraft (and it’s worth noting that this came from our own funds, but it’s included here because it’s business related, and thus a tax deduction). Similarly, the Award section includes our costs for attending the Australian Podcast Awards in Sydney, which included flights, hotels, etc.
Midsumma was the cost of registering our stall at the 2019 Midsumma Festival. Bank and PayPal Fees are self-explanatory. Sound Tools include DAW costs, as well as costs of plugins and such. Office Supplies and Equipment, again, pretty self explanatory, but it’s worth noting that this does include printing costs for business cards and flyers for Midsumma. Finally, Business Registration costs are mostly just the fee for registering our business on our government systems.
| Category | AUD | USD |
|---|---|---|
| Income | $589.07 | $1,523.36 |
| Love and Luck | -$3,059.65 | $0.00 |
| Seabrooke | -$1,800.09 | -$196.98 |
| Memorial | -$370.00 | $0.00 |
| Production Non-Specific | -$2,751.95 | $0.00 |
And here’s where everything comes together. Now, this does look like a significant loss (and it is - The total Loss when everything’s converted over is -$6,389.00), but again, it’s worth remembering that this doesn’t include our income from Kickstarter for Love and Luck S2 - that was a little under AU$5000.00, so that covers a not insignificant amount of this loss, but isn’t covered in this sheet.
With that said, it’s definitely true that we are not making money thus far on our podcast work, but that’s okay - we certainly weren’t expecting to. We are absolutely putting our own money into our work, and that’s okay for the time being - we’re not in huge amounts of debt because of our work, we are absorbing the costs of our work. With that said, if you do feel like helping to improve this financial year’s profit and loss statement, We would love your support on our Patreon, and if a committment like that isn’t your bag, you can also make one-time donations via PayPal as well.
Thankyou for your time, and I hope you’ve gotten something from what we’ve shared today.