Westercon 74 Post-Con: Bookeeping

This morning, after a nice take-out breakfast from the Wigwam, running over to Grocery Outlet for perishables, and updating the Westercon 74 website with new COVID cases (alas), I buckled down on a very important task: collecting my receipts, sorting them by Westercon 74 budget areas, scanning them, and submitting to the Treasurer for reimbursement — assuming the convention took in enough money to pay for everything. This is a non-trivial task. In the end, thousands of dollars' worth of WC74 expenses were charged against my credit cards. If we have enough to pay for it, then I'll get reimbursed. If not, I have to eat it. (Yes, it's potentially a tax-deductible charitable expense, but that isn't that likely given that the mortgage is almost paid off and thus the amount I'd have to have to even bother itemizing is pretty high.) Now I knew that coming in, we might end up spending more than we took in. People have volunteered to donate toward any overrun. There are fannish groups that might be able to do grants. Other people have indeed donated money toward the cost of the convention. From the reaction we've had from those people who were there, we did a good job. But it cost more than we planned. The main extra expense: publications costs appear to have significantly increased over the past few years.

I've told our treasurer to pay everyone else's bills before mine, but I wouldn't mind being able to throw a few thousand dollars of expense reimbursements at my credit cards that I used to buy all of that food and printing supplies.