The IRS has just acknowledged our non-profit tax exempt application that I filed on October 29:
And with this, I should finally be able to turn on the Amazon associate ids for the site, so we can start earning a little bit more money. And there is also a Cafe Press t-shirt we can start selling. Stay tuned!
At long last, after many hours of work and months of time passing, I’ve FedEx’ed off the 1023 Application to the IRS. The 1023 form is the tax-exempt application to the IRS — once we get an advance ruling on our status (the final ruling will come many months down the road) we’ll be able to conduct business as a real non-profit and start handing out tax-deductible receipts for the donations we receive for MusicBrainz.
I feel confident that we’re well setup — this is mainly due to the excellent guidance I’ve received from Randy Heinig at Barack Ferrazzano Kirschbaum Perlman & Nagelberg LLP in Chicago. Thank you very much Randy for all your patience, hard work and thorough understanding of what MusicBrainz does!
Hopefully this will also mark the point where I can spend a little less time on the non-profit and start hammering out more code for MusicBrainz — it’s sorely needed. But before I dream of that, we still need to announce this new venture. Stay tuned for more on that!
I’ll jump in right now and update you on my progress.
I just dropped the FTB3500 tax-exempt application to the State of California into the mail. This application is one of the two big ones that took many weeks of preparing and creating budget forecasts for the next two years. Budgets are not my strength, but our Treasurer helped me with this process and we got it done. Next up is the biggest and most dreaded form — the 1023 application to the IRS.
I’ve also got the first cut at the MetaBrainz web site created — this site will detail everything about the non-profit including all donations and finances, board of directors and other non-profit stuff. Of course the new web-site is not going to be public until we’re ready to announce every last detail of the new non-profit. Stay tuned!
Oh, yeah — I also created this blog this week. Maybe tomorrow I can start hacking on advanced Picard features.
