Our open source 2017 Profit & Loss

In keeping with our push to open source our digital studio, we’re releasing our 2017 Profit & Loss Statement to the world! Our work & changes in 2017 help set us up for our theme of 2018 — patient, sustainable & effective work cycles.

2017— Careful & Gradual Refinement

We’re happy to announce that we hit a few milestones in 2017! In this year, we refined a lot of internal processes, with a focus on moving fast, efficiently & balancing our work and life, so to ultimately do better work in less time.

• We broke $1 million USD in total lifetime income
• We introduced Premium Fridays
• 💯 We shared profit with our employees (more on this soon!)
• We launched our first product, The Baking Supply Co.
• We released Give One, a charity platform centered around local communities, in close collaboration with our friends at ✎ Gin Lane

(Note the 💯Profit Share line in Cost of Goods Sold!)

As always, these Profit & Loss Statements are available on Github, too:

sanctuarycomputer/studio

Expense Categories & Cashflow Forecasting via Float

You’ll notice we have some categories prefixed with [SC]. We’ve been doing our own book keeping & budgets for some time now, and we haven’t always been super diligent about categorizing our day to day expenses in the *most correct* category.

With payroll being as high as it is, it’s become really important for us to know how much runway we have, and when potential problems may occur in our cashflow. Originally we used Google Sheets here, which is a fine solution, albeit somewhat time consuming (and with a higher potential for human error).

So! We’ve started using Float to track & forecast how stable the business will be in coming months — and to use Float effectively, we need to build precise budgets around Quickbooks expense categories. The categories denoted with [SC] represent our standard set that we’ll be using going forward (while deprecating all others).

Float | Cash Flow Forecasting Software

Using Float takes around 15 minutes of weekly maintenance work, and in return, we’ve always got an accurate map of where the business will be for the coming months.

📈 Sanctuary over Time

We’ve now been around long enough to actually eyeball our yearly growth. Taking total income as a crude metric, we can see from a top level at how Sanctuary Computer has grown over time.

2015 ($127k) — 2016 ($420k): 3.3x Growth

2016 ($420k) — 2017 ($813k): 1.93x Growth

This is super positive, but it’s hard to predict how we’ll grow in 2018. We’ve been doing some internal modeling, but it’s a little too early to share some of that. Stay tuned for our upcoming post on our “developer-to-producer ratio” for details into those calculations!

Let’s keep chatting!

Wanna talk more?

Please reach out at hello@sanctuary.computer — we’re friendly and open and would love to chat in greater detail on some of the specifics here.

Ultimately, we believe that large, full service agencies are becoming less appealing to clients out there, and instead, we’re hoping to encourage a world where nimble, specialist companies work together to carefully create intimate & unique work for clients, at realistic prices.

So get in touch! We’re always down for a margarita @ forgtmenot.

Oh and check back for our 2018 Profit & Loss, next year!