VATPAC Financial Update

[Zach B - 1217663]

I am pleased to inform the community that we have successfully registered and established VATSIM Australia Pacific as an unincorporated association in Australia. Operating not-for-profit, this allows us to tap into financial benefits for community organisation such as ours.

The process for this started many years ago when David Z and his Board introduced the Constitution. This has evolved over the last few years and gave us the bones/structure required to officially establish the organisation. Given that we don’t “own” the rights to the name VATSIM, we couldn’t register the association using those words. The organisation was registered as the Online Aviation Organisation Australia, trading as VATSIM Australia Pacific (VATPAC as we know it).

VATPAC has always been funded by either the Board of Directors and also through minor business sponsorships (NetSpace and Delion in the past). Unfortunately, the finances have not always been shared equally amongst Board members with the highest financial burden often falling to the Director of Technology.

VATPAC now has as a registered not-for-profit community bank account with Bendigo Bank, which is connected to Open Collective, allowing us to transparently show the community the money coming in, and going out. This also allows us contribute equally and reimburse any board members with costs that they incur. It also allows us to transparently collect donations from the community to contribute to operating costs.

Thanks to our newly registered organisation, we have also been able to tap into a number of significantly discounted or free products, which allow us to continue to run our organisation efficiently. This includes services like website hosting and email/document storage. This will overall reduce the total cost to the Board of Directors by about 70%.

This doesn’t change how the organisation operates fundamentally, however it enables us to run more economically and hopefully provide a better service to our local community. The VATPAC constitution cover pages have been amended to reflect the correct organisation names moving forward and you may see the new organisation name referenced in other documentation such as board meeting minutes.

If you have any questions or suggestion around these changes, feel free to reach out.