Bill Graziano posted our 2011 budget today. This runs from Jul 1, 2010, through Jun 30, 2011. I hope you’ll review it, and consider reading my thoughts on the budget process as well. It’s not easy reading. That’s not intentional, it’s just a lot of detail. Dig in, ask questions!

If you look at the “Community Programs” section you can see the lines pertaining to SQLSaturday. For 2011 PASS plans to spend about $80k on SQLSaturday. That’s a substantial amount, and at this point I believe it’s enough. We’re hoping to reduce the amount we spend on management by streamlining processes and putting more knowledge into the wiki for self service use, but we will always have costs here – events, especially first time events, need a lot of time and we’re committed to providing that assistance.

Scroll down to “SQLRally – 350” and you can see the entire budget for the event. As I’ve written about some, we worked and worked that budget to preserve the $299 price for the 2 day conference, and that is hard. Meeting space isn’t cheap and they require you to buy food and beverage from them – note the projected spend of $48k on food. Just this sub-budget went through days of discussion and a lot of heated debate, but in the end I think it’s a good try at the model we want to build and sustain.

I’m just lightly commenting on areas I’m involved in, Bill will answer the detail questions. That’s to make sure we get you precise answers, because numbers are, after all, precise. Building that budget isn’t fun, and as Bill noted in his comments, it took 31 iterations to get it done. Something to think about the next time you pass by the office of your own CFO.

I hope you’ll also appreciate that is an ongoing part of our efforts to show you as much as possible about what PASS does and what we’re trying to do in 2010-2011.