Cashless Events

Most of our events operate on a cashless model:

• Sponsors provide venues, food, and other resources directly.
• No money passes through the organizers.
• This simplifies event organization and reduces financial complexity.

Events with Financial Transactions

For events that require monetary handling (e.g., Stupid Hackathon Thailand), we employ the following strategies:

Personal Account Management

• We don't have a central bank account for the collective.
• Event leaders often use their personal bank accounts to receive sponsorship money, although events with a larger team may appoint a dedicated treasury role.
• We recommend organizers create separate savings accounts for Creatorsgarten events to ease reconciliation.
• This approach allows for quick and easy handling of individual sponsorships.
• It's particularly suitable for events with informal sponsorship arrangements.

Transparency and Balance Tracking

• For some events, we create public balance tracking sheets.
• These sheets show income, expenses, and current balance.
• We used Airtable and Google Sheets in the past, but we also have a new system built on top of Grist along with a custom web application (under development) to streamline the process.
• This allows us to maintain transparency, benefiting sponsors, team members, and future organizers.
• Usage of this system is optional for organizers, as each event leader decides how they want to manage their event's finances.
• These public records align with our public by default principle, promoting transparency and trust within our community. See this section for examples.

Partnerships with Organizations

• For some events, we partner with established organizations (companies, associations, or non-profits) to handle financial transactions.
• This approach allows for conventional accounting practices, including proper invoicing and receipt issuance.
• It's particularly beneficial for events seeking corporate sponsorships or requiring more formal financial management.

Per-event financial statements

Final income and expenses for each event live in the Finance/ namespace, one page per event slug, e.g. Finance/sht9. These are actuals — what the event turned out to cost. Forward-looking sponsorship packages live in Sponsorship instead, and planning notes in OrganizerNotes.

• Finance/bac
• Finance/bangkok
• Finance/bkkjs21
• Finance/golf1
• Finance/hacktoberfest2022
• Finance/sht2
• Finance/sht3
• Finance/sht6
• Finance/sht7
• Finance/sht8
• Finance/sht9
• Finance/wind2

Front matter schema

Each page carries a statementOfActivities block, rendered by the StatementOfActivities template:

statementOfActivities:
  income:
    - label: 'Sponsorship'
      amount: 1234.56
  expenses:
    - label: 'Food and Beverage'
      amount: 1234.56

Amounts are Thai baht, to two decimal places. Labels follow the ledger's own account names so that a page can be regenerated from the ledger without a mapping step. Common expense labels: Food and Beverage, Venue, Accommodation, Prize, Swag, Props, Equipment, Transportation, Parking, Ticketing Platform, Miscellaneous Expense.

These pages are generated from the ledger, not hand-maintained. If a page and the ledger disagree, the ledger is correct — re-export rather than editing the page, and record where the figures came from in a Source line at the bottom.

Carrying funds between events

Creatorsgarten has no central account, so an event's closing balance stays in whichever organizer's account held it and is often used to seed a later event. Two conventions keep this legible:

• Where a carry-forward is recorded as a transaction, it appears as an income line on the receiving event (for example, Finance/sht9 opens with ฿1,648.11 carried forward from Finance/sht8).
• Where an event spends more than it raised because earlier leftovers covered the gap, the statement shows the real shortfall and the Notes section explains what funded it. Finance/wind2 is the worked example — a ฿7,974.00 gap covered from pooled funds, not a loss.

Never balance a statement with an invented line item. A shortfall that was really covered from elsewhere is more useful to a future organizer than a tidy zero.

Prior art

Example of organizations that make their finances public.

• OpenCollective: https://github.com/opencollective/opencollective-api/tree/main/server/models
• Hack Club: https://hcb.hackclub.com/hq/transactions