Antioch Budgets For Dummies
Given the recent accounting error by the University in which they projected their cash flow to be 30% worse then it actually is (see pg. 3), the researchers at The Antioch Papers have created “Antioch Budgets for Dummies” Intended for Antioch Trustees, Alumni, Workers, Students, and Community Members; ABD is a “tool-kit” they can use to make sure such accounting errors don’t occur in the future.
ABD.pdf [4.14MB],
Documents
ABD.xls [63.50KB],
Budget-Box
What is missing from these budgets is a complete picture of the University and its campuses based on assets, liabilities, and net assets. After 2004, the University stopped giving this information to the Trustees as part of its Year End Financial Statements. Without this information it is impossible to see a complete “bottom line” picture of University finances, which is why we have titled this document “Antioch Budgets for Dummies”. As life-long learners, we are left with a rather dumbed-down fiscal language which, despite its limitations, is capable of producing some insightful utterances about the economics of the College and University. A partial set of the University’s un-audited breakout of assets, liabilities, and net assets for the individual campuses is presented in section 3.
Because the budget spreadsheets in this document cover a 10-year span, they don’t fit neatly on one page. You will need to print and tape the two-page spreadsheets together in order to view the total 10-year spreadsheet. While this may seem cumbersome, we feel it is essential to see the fiscal life of the College and University in a decade-long arc so that we can see where we have been and where we are going.
Also each budget contains 53 budget item rows. We could have condensed these rows down to the six major sub-totals of the budget but once again we felt this type of simplification would render much of this rich fiscal history invisible.
All the spreadsheets are available as Excel (.xls) spreadsheets with active formulas, so users can recalculate the past and future of Antioch based on financial values they may wish to insert or delete. These documents are copy and paste ready, so you are welcome to reformat the information as you see fit. In fact this whole document should be seen as a tool kit or language system for beginning to articulate the fiscal lives of the College and University.
For some this “tool-kit” will begin to form the basis for discovering where their cash donations to the College went and how such donations might likely be spent in the future. For College workers we hope it will provide a framework to begin tracking their considerable contributions of human capital in Antioch College/University in the past and moving forward.