Dollar$ & sen$e & PSA - Photographic Society of America's 1991-92 audit report

There are as many different ways of looking at the Society's audit report as there are persons interested in doing so. A client of Dun & Bradstreet may be primarily interested in how well we are able to pay our bills. A potential major contributor may want to know about our general financial condition. The Internal Revenue Service is mainly interested in the degree to which the Society is fulfilling its exempt purposes. And you, the members of PSA, need accurate information about many aspects of Society operations, depending on your individual areas of involvement.

The Executive Committee has to be concerned with all of these needs, and in addition, they must use this information as the basis for making viable decisions that will affect the Society's future, tomorrow and the days after that. The audit report that accompanies this article is the 5th to be published since the Executive Committee applied the brakes to the over-spending habit that had been weakening the Society for several decades. As this report indicates, the Society's fiscal condition continues to be strong. This doesn't mean that "we've got it made." That day never comes. It does mean that sound fiscal management, combined with long-range planning, is giving the Society a future it might not otherwise have had.

Maintaining a strong fiscal condition is an on-going challenge, one in which spur-of-the-moment ideas have to give way to more critical concerns. Long-range planning and continued fiscal vigilance are necessary tools of a responsible management group. Those tools are playing an increasingly significant part in the management decisions that are enabling the Society to move forward.

There is progress to report in several areas. The new Membership Directory, which will once again be provided free to our volunteer workers, contains several features not included a year ago. There is a new package of materials for prospective members in the design phase, and Members Handbook already in the early planning stages. A newly developed Lapse Query Program is enabling the Headquarters staff to be in touch with each reporting lapsed member, and to reinstate many who still want to be a part of PSA. A new Governing Document Control Program will soon allow the staff to keep all of our volunteer workers informed about rules changes and new procedures that affect their work.

Granted, we still have a lot of growing up to do, if the Society is to reach its full potential. We need to begin to realize that we are not just an "overgrown camera club," but a full-fledged corporation with legal restrictions and financial responsibilities that touch every comer of our operations. We must come to grips with the fact that this Society is subject to the same negative economic events that are affecting other businesses. It is only prudent to project that we may, in the near future, have to find innovative ways of meeting our continuously growing operational commitments with fewer resources than are available today.

No audit report can indicate all of the management decisions that already affect the Society's "bottom line." Whether you use the $145,270 excess revenue figure or the $159,766 fund balance increase, a host of commitments have already allocated all but a few dollars for purposes other than general operations. First in line are membership dues, that go to cover all of the basic operations without which there would be no organization: Headquarters Services, General Operations, the PSA Journal and the numerous Society committees, few of which generate any revenue. Then come the funds generated by Chapter activities, which are only available to the Chapters, and funds generated by the Divisions, which are reserved for Division use. Next comes net income received from the two Memorial Endowment Funds, which is now set aside exclusively for approved special projects. Finally comes investment income and contributions, which go to purchase additional investments that will provide future income.

These commitments, and a host of other management decisions, are necessarily beyond the scope of this article. However, if you are interested in having additional information on specific aspects of the Society's fiscal operations, we invite you to make your interests known so we can prepare an informative response for a future issue of the PSA Journal.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Photographic Society of America, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group