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Thanks all for your contributions to the forum over the last month, as the 'treasurer' for AS and the one funding the costs up-front, I wanted to update everyone on the current finances of the forum and set out the plan going forward. The Fundrazr page has now been locked and will stop accepting new donations. The total raised this month was £677.00 Costs this month have been a total of £296.00 for the software licence, hosting and backups. Fundrazr admin costs and paypal processing fees were a further £67.70. Combined, the costs were £363.70 The current balance in the account is therefore +£313.30 We propose we keep this balance as a reserve in case of unexpected expenses, and open a new Fundrazr campaign to cover the costs for the next month. The target will be £110 to cover Fundrazr fees, hosting and backups, which come to a combined total of £94.00. The software is paid for through to November 23rd now. The link to the new FundRazr page can be found HERE Thanks to all who donated, it is very much appreciated.

This month there has been a change of forum treasurer. Yours truly will now be managing the forum funding as @stanky, having done superb work for the past few years has stood down. I'd like to take the opportunity to thank Stanky for everything he's done, and how easy he has made the transition. A couple of changes I have made, partly due to the demise of PayPal moneygroups, and due to my own thoughts on forum funding: I will now be using a group funding service called Ko-Fi. The main benefit of doing so is that they are zero-fees, which means (by my rough estimates) that we won't loose something like £40 each year to fees. This in turn will then be used to pay for both the forum funding and the license for the forum software. Rather than close off the fund raiser every month once it has met it's target, I will leave the fundrasing open for 24hrs or so, to give everyone a chance to make a contribution should they wish to. This, due to the generosity of members here, will likely mean that I don't need to run a fundraiser every month, only when funds get low. This has the benefit of allowing people who are not welded to the forum 24/7 to be able to make a contribution, and likely will reduce the amount of work that I need to do by not running a fundraiser every month. I am lazy. I will, of course, have accounts visible here and to anyone who wants to see them in greater detail. The name of the game here is open-ness and transparency: A modus operandi put into place by Stanky, and which I plan to use as the gold standard. So. This month's fundraiser. Hosting costs were £65.08. Slightly higher than the usual £50-ish, but this may be due to heavy use of the forum, and a slightly poor EUR to GBP exchange rate. The donation pot is at: https://ko-fi.com/autoshite I would welcome any feedback from this site... how easy it is to make donations etc. If it works well, I'll keep using it, if not, there are plenty of other services. Once the fundraiser has been open for a day or so, I'll update here with how it's gone.