We’ve added a new section to our site today: financial statements. The new page contains public records of our finances and is designed to increase our accountability and transparency to the Homestar Runner Wiki and FellowSites communities.

From the new page, you can access a balance sheet and an income/expense statement, as well as drill down into certain accounts to view complete transaction histories (I should point out here that individual fellows’ accounts aren’t available for viewing from this page for obvious privacy reasons).

The main motivation behind this new page is that it will replace the manually-updated (and dismally outdated) ledger at the Homestar Runner Wiki. The new page calculates its figures drawing from data in the “My account” system we debuted last May, which is capable of capturing new transactions (donations and dues payments) and recording them automatically. This means the financial statements should remain completely up to date with little or no administrative intervention.

I’m excited to unveil this, as the “My account” system is the first rather complete web application I’ve developed myself, and this new piece was really the end goal of the whole system. I’ve had to learn a lot more PHP and MySQL and I’ve spent many hours and nearly driven my wife crazy (thanks for being patient honey!) to bring all this to fruition. Unfortunately, because I’m so proud of it, I’m not really the best objective critic of the system, so I welcome your feedback, negative or positive. You can comment using the comment form below, by using our contact form, or by editing the talk page for the Homestar Runner Wiki ledger.

You can access the new financial statements page from the footer of any page on the site.