Finances & Final Donation

This report was written by the financial/head mod, Skylark. Hello!

All money amounts in this post are in USD.

Raw Data

You can see our financial spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SiLEG7zvFYmGVfqrdrGIzDiZKMmYdJQUfh4JZnWPAtI/edit?usp=sharing

The first page of this spreadsheet (“Order List”) is the most relevant, with a full list of all orders and costs as well as final tallies.

Income

All told, Perennial received 57 orders and took in $2,124.04 (after all transaction fees, before shipping/printing/postcard and bookmark costs).

A screenshot of a bank account transaction summary. The bank account name is "Perennial reguri calendar," and the current balance is $2,124.04. The Interest YTD is $0.05. Below is a list of transactions, all transfer deposits from Paypal in various amounts.

Costs

Our store was powered by woocommerce, which utilizes paypal, stripe and its own payment gateway called woocommerce payments. We lost over a hundred dollars to its attending transaction fees. That money never made it to the bank account, so those costs don’t appear on the spreadsheet.

In addition, Stripe individually deducted $13.48 in additional fees from the bank account.

Taxes

I spoke with an accountant in my state, who advised me to save 15% of the project’s income for tax purposes. If I have money left over after paying taxes for this project, I will make a second donation. 15% of $2,124.04 is $318.60 (rounded down) saved for taxes.

Lulu’s costs for publishing and shipping our print calendars/fiction anthologies came to $1126.32.

A sample screenshot of our order list from Lulu. Shipping addresses/names and mod personal information are blocked out. — An example of our orders list on Lulu. The numbers and costs of the orders shown above correlate with the spreadsheet, and are accurate.

Proofs

Proofs cost $112.74 from Lulu. I ended up ordering 3 rounds of proofs, and sent the calendar to my artist mod as well as myself. Shipping to my artist mod in Canada was uniquely expensive, and to meet our shop opening deadline I had to expedite proof shipments, which also increased the cost.

Extras

The bookmarks & postcards that we added as an early ordering bonus, as well as a thank-you gift to our contributors, were $169.57 to print and ship.

A screenshot of vistaprint's website, showing that $65.43 was paid for printing and shipping of the bookmark and postcard bonus addons.

We used Vistaprint, who charged $65.43 for printing and shipping. (Postcard printers were easy to find, but I had a surprisingly difficult time finding anyone who would print bookmarks for me. I even called my local UPS store and they wouldn’t give me the time of day.)

I then spent $104.14 on shipping costs: $12.01 on shipping labels, $57.60 on stamps (including international stamps), and $34.53 on envelopes.

$104.14 + $65.43 = $169.57 total for the postcards and bookmarks.

In summary:

A screenshot of the finances spreadsheet, showing total orders (57), total revenue, and then all costs deducted to have a final profit total of $396.81. — Donation left over after expenses: $396.81.

(Please note that each participant received a Full Bundle of the calendar as compensation for participating in Perennial. Those costs are not included in these calculations; I paid for that out of pocket, and had planned to from the start of the project.)

Lastly, I tossed in a little extra money to bring the donation amount to a nice round number, and added $23 to cover transaction costs on Rainforest Foundation US’s donation website, to get:

Graphic that reads, "$400 Total Donation to Rainforest Foundation US." In the lower right corner, Red is popping a confetti popper, and Green is shielding his eyes from the confetti while grinning. Art is by Mieudiary. — ($423 with transaction costs, $400 actionable amount. Art by Mieudiary)

Proof of donation screenshot indicating that $423 was donated to Rainforest Foundation US.

Rainforest-Foundation-US-Receipt-Nov-24-2022-redacted Download

If you would like to add to our final amount by donating directly to Rainforest Foundation US, you can do so by visiting our special donation page:
https://rainforestfoundation.org/?form=donate&fundraiser=NNMPCHNS

Lessons and Conclusion

All told, I learned a lot from our first finance mod experience. I know now to minimize some cost by giving more time for proofs in the project schedule. I will fiddle around more with woocommerce in the future to see if I can reduce the transaction fees; one step I may take to reduce those fees may include refusing to accept international paypal currencies. (I’m still debating that one.) I didn’t expect so many people to buy full bundles, and anticipating that might have changed our pricing choices from the start. I might also use a different printer in the future: Lulu is known to be convenient, but expensive. I will probably charge a little more for shipping. Lastly, I really liked including a small thank-you gift for early orders and our contributors. For my next project I will plan for it from the beginning, which will give me more time to secure the best price.

$400 is a huge donation, especially for this mod team’s first project! Thank you again for supporting us. With your help, we were able to support a charity that does so much good for both Indigenous peoples and environmental conservation. Perennial is the first collaborative hard-copy project in Western reguri fandom, as far as I know, and I’m proud of everyone who joined us for this groundbreaking work. Thank you for helping us reach our dreams!

Sincerely,

Mod Skylark