1 - How does $1800 / year cover the costs of actually DOING the accounting, e.g. creating new members & invoices, processing payments, calling on collections, etc. This number seems low to me. Additional thought, some entities will want to pay with a credit card, we should prepare for this and cover the costs of processing payments in the budget.

Neutral Path is currently donating bookkeeping services to the exchange. By Neutral Path I really mean Kayla. This is factored into the current budget. Other than the proposed new invoicing there are less than 10 transactions per year. We can use Paypal to process credit cards the fee is about 3%.

2 - Where is hardware refresh in the budget? I see a clipped sentence in your message ( This would cover hardware support and Arin fees and accounting expense with the remainder going) - maybe it was in there?

Depending on the response to the request for payment there is between 8k and 24k annually building up for hardware refresh or additions. A large update will have to be dealt with at the time or with a future rate increase.

We have been lucky to secure donations of equipment, but what about the future? Your budget should include setting aside dollars for hardware expansion and refresh, and not just switches, but route servers too.

Minor additions are figured in, Major replacement is not.

Additional thoughts, if new technologies emerge and a hardware vendor that has said technology doesn't feel like donating equipment, how would we proceed without a hardware budget? And... by accepting donations from hardware vendors, we are setting the precedent of "picking a winner", and could cause headache/heartache in the future.

We would have to deal with new technologies as they emerge. We've been accepting hardware donations for quite some time without serious issue. The current kit contains a lot of donated parts.

Jay Hanke

CTO

Neutral Path Communications

3 Civic Center Plaza, Suite 204

Mankato, MN 56001

(507) 327-2398 mobile

jayhanke@neutralpath.net