Budget 2026 preparations

Hello,

I am currently working on preparing the budget for 2026 and would like to share the individual steps here with you.

In the end, there will be a spreadsheet, that - in redacted form, to ensure confidentiality of several items - will be made public.

I’ve prepared the general overview and just had a call with the accountant, who confirmed the numbers. They are obviously based on the preliminary closing ledgers and might slightly change before the final approval of the closing ledgers.

Numbers as of January 1

Calculation for 2026
Sum of available funds: 3.831.709,41 €

Funds not to be used/already bound
Capital stock: 50.000,00 €
Free reserves incl. those built from 2025 incl. capital investment: 1.458.980,87 €
Credit card/VAT/claims: 102.997,57 €

Available for 2026: 2.219.730,97 €

Note: The “available” line is not the amount of money we can spend additionally in 2026. It is the total amount of money we must spend in 2026, as if there were no ongoing projects or recurring expenses (“all at zero”). What we can spend reduced by the existing commitments in terms of projects and recurring costs. In theory we could spend also the free reserves, but we do not have to.

For the details on our budgeting process, I’ve written a howto about that in the past.

I will follow-up with the next steps in this thread later on.

Florian

The second part of the budget is to look at the projects.

  • MC request: Improvements on the Membership Committee tooling

    • total budgeted sum: 12.524,75 €
    • spent by now: 1.566,71 €
    • budget left: 10.958,04 €
    • comments/proposals: no contractual obligation currently, but further work planned
  • 2-4% budget to FLOSS software as devprojects or support

    • total budgeted sum: 5.000,00 €
    • spent by now: 0,00 €
    • budget left: 5.000,00 €
    • comments/proposals: needs a “driver”, otherwise propose to dissolve, no contractual obligation currently
  • BugZilla release funding

  • [REDACTED: legal topic]

    • total budgeted sum: 5.000,00 €
    • spent by now: 0,00 €
    • budget left: 5.000,00 €
    • comments/proposals: no contractual obligation currently
  • LibreTranslate Improvement of localizations and translations for worldwide involvement of volunteers

    • total budgeted sum: 5.000,00 €
    • spent by now: 0,00 €
    • budget left: 5.000,00 €
    • comments/proposals: no contractual obligation currently, @sophi might be able to give an update
  • Outreachy

    • total budgeted sum: 35.000,00 €
    • spent by now: 17.367,88 €
    • budget left: 17.632,12 €
    • comments/proposals: @ilmari might be able to give an update
  • Graphic design work for great visuals for website, socials, blog posts and marketing

    • total budgeted sum: 25.000,00 €
    • spent by now: 3.570,00 €
    • budget left: 21.430,00 €
    • comments/proposals: contractual obligation
  • LibreOffice SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) – CRA conformance

    • total budgeted sum: 35.000,00 €
    • spent by now: 0,00 €
    • budget left: 35.000,00 €
    • comments/proposals: no contractual obligation
  • [REDACTED: legal topic]

    • total budgeted sum: 1.149,54 €
    • spent by now: 1.039,94 €
    • budget left: 109,60 €
    • comments/proposals: contractual obligation
  • [REDACTED: legal topic]

    • total budgeted sum: 5.211,91 €
    • spent by now: 0,00 €
    • budget left: 5.211,91 €
    • comments/proposals: contractual obligation

In total, that makes existing projects worth 140.786,20 €, out of which 29.476,76 € are spent and 111.309,44 € are not spent yet.

The next thing we need to look into are recurring projects/expenses.

  • For LibOCon & FOSDEM, we have reserved 60.000,00 € per year. In 2025, we spent 51.183,63 €, so the budget seems appropriate.

  • For the community budget, we have reserved 25.000,00 € and we spent 15.014,05 € in 2025, so the sum seems appropriate as well, giving a bit of reserve.

  • For the marketing budget, we have reserved 30.000,00 € and we spent 3.590,46 € in 2025, so we might want to look into the number.

For the latter two, this is something for @italovignoli and @mikesaunders to look into proposals. It is worth nothing here that LibreOffice is also an SPI-associated project, and they kindly refund some of our community events from their funds. That is at their discretion obviously, so we might want to reserve some backup in case there are issues.

  • Next is the infrastructure budget for server, virtual machine and bare-metal hardware, domains, hosting and the like. We reserved a total of 70.000,00 € and in 2025 we spent 51.420,28 €. With a bit of reserve, also that budget seems appropriate.

  • For trainings, we reserved 5.000 € and spent 1.302,08 €. Given we also want some trainings for board and MC, the sum seems quite appropriate.

  • For running cost & discretionary spending (incl. insurances, membership fees etc.) we have reserved 40.000,00 € and spent 23.551,34 €. We might cut down on that a little, but I would keep some reserve. (One year ago we had 10.000 € more in expenses.)

  • For legal advice, accounting, payroll services and auditor we reserved 46.422 € and we spent 68.335,65 € in 2025, mostly related due to the problems from the past that still need solving. It might be sensible to increase this budget.

The last part of the budget is the other recurring cost, mostly compensations and salaries.

The projection of these accumulate to 1.226.613,54 € for the year 2026, depending on currency conversion, banking fees and tax changes.

In total, the fixed/expected costs, including accounting, payroll, auditor, legal consultancy, running costs and discretionary spending, trainings, infrastructure, LibOCon and FOSDEM, community and marketing budgets are 1.503.035,54 €.

If we were to keep all projects and budget as planned (for details, see my other messages in this thread), the minimum still to plan in for spending in 2026 is 605.385,99 €. Adding the free reserve on top, we could spend up to 2.064.366,86 €. (I don’t say this would be advisable.)

The breakdown in summary:

Sum of available funds: 3.831.709,41 €

minus funds not to be used/already bound

  • Capital stock: 50.000,00 €
  • free reserves incl. those built from 2025 incl. capital investment: 1.458.980,87 €
  • credit card/VAT/claims: 102.997,57 €

= intermediate result: 2.219.730,97 €

minus existing projects: 111.309,44 €
minus recurring costs and existing budgets: 1.503.035,54 €

= minimum to be spent for 2026: 605.385,99 €
= maximum to be spent for 2026: 605.385,99 € + 1.458.980,87 € = 2.064.366,86 €

I have prepared the spreadsheet for the board (in the budget 2026 folder). I will prepare a redacted version for board, MC and team, removing sensitive data, ahead of the meeting. That document then can also be shared with the general ublic.

Some further work has been happening since FOSDEM, in particular factoring in the costs for our potential two new hires for Base and for Scripting.

I have now updated the budget spreadsheet with the recent numbers, and we’ll discuss it at the next board meeting. The plan is to make a (redacted) version of the spreadsheet available around the time of that board call.

Given the very good result of 2025, with those two new planned hires, we still can plan in a few hundred thousand Euro for 2026, without touching the free reserves.

The planning discussed at FOSDEM is to hire more developers for in-house competence and sharing of knowledge, but final decisions have not been made yet. Also for potential further roles, TDF wants to actually hire and provide the safety of employment.

I’ve updated the budget spreadsheet for Monday’s board call. Based on the current estimate, which includes the planned new hires for Base and Scripting, we have:

  • Recurring costs (including marketing and community pools, FOSDEM and LibOCon): 1.638.733,50 €
  • Pending projects: 111.309,44 €
  • Minimum to still plan spending for: 469.688,03 €

The redacted budget spreadsheet is now available at budget_2026_redacted.ods - The Document Foundation Nextcloud

The preliminary February legders are in, and based on that, in the first two months of the year, TDF made:

  • 412.114,18 € in donations
  • 35.773,63 € in the business entity (which is mostly the app stores, and some t-shirt sales)
  • 3.464,08 € from capital investment

Accounting is done on the day the funds are received, so some of that income might have actually occured in December 2025, but paid out only in 2026, and as such the numbers could be slightly diluted.

As it’s mid-May, it’s about time to finalize the budget. I made the following edits, both in the internal, as well as in the public and redacted spreadshet:

  • Accounting, payroll, auditor, legal advice: increased by 20.000 €.

Given our higher income, it is likely the audit as well as the accounting will get a bit more expensive. Also the legal expenses will be higher, given ongoing topics. The new sum approximately matches what we spent in 2025.

With this, the sum we still need to plan for 2026 is 449.688,03 €.

To finalize the budget, I suggest to plan in these funds for developer hirings, by splitting it into four roles. While this might look like a high sum for each role, please keep ind mind:

  • We employ in different countries with very different compensations and employer costs. Some countries cost nearly a full gross salary on top for social security and pension fund.

  • Employment intermediates (see From the machine room of TDF: International hirings) charge high fees, and we pay VAT on top, making even regular salaries quite expensive.

As for the roles, I don’t want to preclude anything, but we should come to a conclusion what we aim for soon. I’ve heard web and mobile, online, QA and some other roles.

Let’s discuss it in today’s board meeting.

That’s indeed the plan we discussed yesterday. The public spreadsheet reflects this too.

I have shared the document with the accountant, to prepare our annual filing.

Some updates from the recent accounting:

January-April 2026 donation income: 775.740,19 € (vs. January-April 2025: 574.981,59 €)
January-April 2026 Apple App Store sales: 65.448,60 € (vs. January-April 2025: 36.774,82 €)
January-April 2026 Microsoft App Store sales: 20.052,88 € (vs. January-April 2025: 14.703,22 €)

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