The the second quarter of the fiscal year is over and my job is to hunt down all expenses made in EMEA and close the quarterly account. There is still one payment left, but it’s not so significant, so I think I can safely sum up the quarter. It’s been easy this time because Q2 was quite boring in terms of expenses. We produced Fedora 19 media where we achieved even a lower price than before. We paid just $1668 for 4000 dual-layer DVDs which is only $.41 for one. I remember we paid twice or three times more to the old vendor.

We also paid much less than expected for shipping. We had pretty high shipping costs and after the budget cuts I had to look for a cheaper solution. Now, we ship packages with Czech Post which is a standard postal service. I shipped a lot of packages all around EMEA (quite a few outside EU) and the total cost was $701. There are also some disadvantages. Delivery times are longer than with Fedex or DHL we used before. It’s just a few days within EU, but it could be a couple of weeks if you ship to Africa.  We also can’t track packages all the way to the final destination. Postal services outside EU either don’t have tracking or don’t share it with Czech Post. And packages more likely end up stuck at customs. On the other hand, DHL and Fedex were completely out of our budget possibilities.

Due to these savings, we’re on track with our annual budget. We’ve spent $13,208 in the first two quarters and there is $8,892 left in the annual budget and planned expenses are $9,463 which is just slightly more.

In the next several weeks, I’d like to arrange a quarterly budget meeting where all regional treasurers and the Fedora budget owner get together and discuss the budget situation in all regions. We have to make sure that spending in all regions is on track and we don’t spend too much or too little.