Financing the KSA: New year, new budget

We are entering one of the KSA’s busiest seasons of the year

Every business and organization needs to account for their spending and investments throughout the year—where money came in, where it’s going, and how quickly. Larger organizations such as the Kwantlen Student Association need to check their finances more often than normal, in order to achieve a higher level of transparency.

“Between December and January we draft up a budget which needs to be accepted by the board of directors of the KSA from the KSA council,” says Waheed Taiwo, the KSA’s vice-president of finance. “We want to be extremely careful with our money, so we check where we are spending money and where money is coming in. This process is done every month—however, once a year we decide upon the organization’s budget for the next year.”

Every organization has to do something similar to what the KSA is doing at Kwantlen, but for the KSA the main concern is for the students it serves. A university’s students make up the main audience they need to keep happy in order to continue operating, and every year the KSA calls on students to have a look at the new proposed budget and have a say in what should remain funded or what should be cut.

One example of this is the gym in the Cedar building. According to Taiwo it was previously owned by Kwantlen itself, and in order for students to have access to it they would have to pay a $5 fee.

“We decided to help out students and talked the university into letting us pay that $5 fee they were charging. Now any student can use the gym and its equipment for free,” says Taiwo. “So what students want is very important to us.” On a similar note, three months ago the KSA put forward a motion for new gym equipment and the motion passed. This new equipment should now be in the gym.

This year’s accounting operations have just begun—though the KSA has completed the budget it wants to propose, their work is far from over. They still need to get approval from the board of directors, which is good news for students who may have some ideas that they would like to see implemented at Kwantlen.

Taiwo does explain, however, that not everything is ideal for the upcoming year’s budget. “The budget will contract for some of the worksheets because revenue has decreased,” he explains. This decrease in funding will affect important line-items such as the student life budget, which has already projected a $80,000 decrease for next year.

But that won’t stop the KSA from taking the initiative on new projects. “As far as investments go, we’d like to open a new student union building, which will provide not only a bigger space for clubs but also give Kwantlen a better sense of community,” says Taiwo.

While students are in on the decision making process for approving or disapproving certain financial motions, another important source of ideas for the KSA comes from their competitors. Any respectable company will tell you how important it is for a company to gauge where it stacks up against the competition in order to see “the bigger picture,” and account for where it’s lacking. The KSA does something very similar to other universities, and looks for services or operation plans that students at KPU would benefit from.

“We see what other universities are doing and if we see something we like, we begin to try and figure out how to implement it at Kwantlen,” says Taiwo. “If we are already collecting fees from students in an area that is related to whatever service we want to launch, then we may not even have to collect additional funds and we’ll use what we already have.”