Put this on the list of things that drive me crazy.
I don't talk about work much here, but I don't think I've made it any secret that I work in a university. More specifically, I work for a unit on campus that receives no state-line funding. Every dollar we bring in comes from a client who pays us to build them a web site or application. In that respect we work very much like a business does. However, there is one important distinction between how we work and how a business works. While a business gets to count up its profits, at the end of the fiscal year we have to make sure we don't show a profit. They have loosened things somewhat, but essentially come July 1 every year we start out with nothing in the bank.
Where things get nutty is that other units on campus have the same compelling need to zero out their accounts, too. This money is not spent uniformly throughout the year, however. Because folks don't know at the beginning of the year what their expenses are going to be, they tend to hang on to every cent they have. Near the end of the year they then have a frantic dash to spend everything in their account. As you can probably guess, this means that a lot of money gets sent our way as the fiscal year draws to a close. Unfortunately, there's only so much work we can do in the waning months of the year, so we sometimes end up getting paid in one year for work that we do in the next. As long as the cycle continues that's theoretically okay, but we end up doing a fair amount of work "for free," and some requests we just have to turn down altogether.
All that said, it turns out there's actually a loophole in the rules. Apparently the rule about spending all of our money only applies to income that originates from a university account. Money that comes from outside the university is not subject to that rule, and can be rolled over indefinitely. What that means is that in order to server our university clients better, we may actually be well-served to seek out non-university clients. It boggles the mind.
Posted by Jason at April 3, 2007 07:13 PM