Mo Money Mo Problems

“Money is a mirror. It shows you a magnified image of who you are within. If you are good, it makes you better. If you’re not, it makes you worse.” – Anonymous

For the past few years, I’ve been putting together a very simple summary of GSUSA’s financials over on GirlScoutGovernance.com (GSG). Usually I don’t leave any commentary when I post the link and let those who are interested come to their own conclusions, but I felt compelled to comment with this recent one because there’s talk about raising membership dues out there. I’m not opposed to raising membership dues, but I do feel like GSUSA needs to answer for some of its recent decision making, and we need to make sure what’s been going on the past few years isn’t what’s in store for the future.

So without further ado, here’s FY2023’s financial summary. It would be best to review it first before reading my very amateur commentary listing my concerns. I say amateur because I am not an accountant nor do I claim to have all of the answers. And if I’m wrong about anything, please correct me. I would like to add that the 2023 Fiscal Year ended 9/30/23, so granted, it’s dated. To be fair, it’s very possible that the new leadership that we’re under has taken action to tend to these areas of concern. We won’t know until FY2024 ends in a couple of months.

When it comes to money, one of the biggest sticking points over the past 10 years has been our nationwide IT platform. I’ve written about it ad nauseam through the years so I won’t rehash a lot of it. But if you’re new to this, our IT platform encompasses components such as Digital Cookie, Volunteer Toolkit, myGS, gsLearn, gsEvents, and whatever backend council staff use to do their daily duties. We’re attempting to cobble together a whole bunch of different web applications and services and use a single sign-on (SSO) to tie it all together using Salesforce as the foundation. If you’ve used it at any point as a volunteer or staffer, you know that it’s buggy and clunky, to put it nicely. GSUSA charges councils a lot of money for its use, and councils are required to use it per their council charter. GSUSA is well aware of its shortcomings and has been sinking money into it attempting to fix the whack-a-mole issues, but let’s call it what it is at this point – a boondoggle.

For the past few years, I’ve been able to submit questions to the GSUSA Stewardship Report so that I could track how much we’re putting toward this IT platform. FY2023’s figures are just estimated since last year’s Stewardship Report was held before the fiscal year ended due to the July date of the NCS.

Another possible area of concern is that we’ve used our line of credit for the fourth year in a row. Using a line of credit every once in a while isn’t necessarily a bad thing and wasn’t surprising when the world shut down due to covid. However, we’re now on our fourth year of relying on our line of credit, and apparently according to the audit (pg. 28), we’ve maxed it out: “The Organization was able to borrow, repay in whole or in part, and re-borrow up to the total commitment until January 31, 2023, at which point no further loans could be requested or reborrowed.” Even after receiving $15 million from the MacKenzie Scott donation in FY2022, we still took out more for FY2023 leaving us with a debt of $13 million.

So obviously, we’re spending more than we can take in. An easy answer to fix this would be to raise membership dues. However, something happened the last time we raised dues:

What stands out is the huge jump in spending starting in FY2018 which happens to be the year membership dues went from $15 to $25, and expenses remained high. Something else jumped in FY2018:

We were told back in 2017 that the $10 membership dues increase would go to pay for the IT platform, but costs for it didn’t increase until FY2019. So why the huge jump in professional services in FY2018 and why has spending remained high even though membership dues revenue has fallen? Just for curiosity’s sake, I plotted out IT platform spending, professional services spending, and membership dues revenue and it looks like this:

Like I said, I’m not necessarily opposed to a membership dues increase. But I do want to know that the money won’t just be tossed away into the IT and consultant money pits with not much to show for it like what’s happened since FY2018.