Team use of Petty Cash?
 

Hello All,

Our school district is very supportive of our team, but is proposing to only allow us to purchase items with Purchase Orders. I have heard (and seen a couple of posts) that some teams have a District credit card or a Petty Cash box that can handle smaller purchases. I am trying to collect supporting info, and would really appreciate hearing from the teams that have either of those two forms (or others?) of paying for small items.

Thanks in advance for your help!
Ty Fredriks
FIRST 3512 Spartatroniks
Orcutt Academy High School, CA

Re: Team use of Petty Cash?
 

We have a separate entity which is pretty much a booster club that handles all direct purchases for the team.

We also use cash generated from can/bottle recycling for small purchases and reimbursements.

Re: Team use of Petty Cash?
 

We use PO's to our advantage and set-up blanket PO's with McMaster-Carr, AndyMark, etc. This allows us to quickly make purchases during the build season. For smaller vendors and such, we either use the school credit card or our teacher uses his credit card and submits a receipt for reimbursement. Usually the next day and he is reimbursed fairly quickly.

Re: Team use of Petty Cash?
 

Unfortunately, our schools only deal with POs with the vendors, that means NO CREDIT CARDS.
So we use our POs with any vendor we can (including Amazon) and we have a snack kart through which we can easily make $50 in one day of sales (assuming we are fully stocked), which usually covers our costs at Home Depot or Lowe's

Re: Team use of Petty Cash?
 

Here it's done mostly out of pocket on a mentor's credit card. ( :( ) Then we are reimbursed by check in about a week. It's not ideal, but it's about the best we can do here.

Re: Team use of Petty Cash?
 

For us, everything goes on the mentor's credit cards. We keep track of it all through Google Doc's - a spread sheet with itemized totals and who's owed, as well as a folder for scanned/picture receipts. Those get submitted to the school, and we each get a big fat check at the end of the build season (and usually 1-2 other times during the year to cover offseason activities/purchases).

It's important to work with your school district to determine what works best for your team. Make sure you understand their rationale - are they worried about traceability with petty cash? Do they feel it necessary to have all purchases itemized (maybe to look at improving purchases/purchase power across multiple groups, or to protect against fraud - remember, it only takes 1 person to ruin it for everyone)?

Perhaps a counter-proposal would work: Agree to make as many of the purchases this next year as possible with POs, but leave room for a quicker method of purchase, like reimbursements with itemized receipts. That will give you a great paper trail of what was purchased during the season, and if you keep notes as to why you couldn't use a PO for each reimbursed purchase, it will give you hard data to bring to a meeting next year with the district, where you can work with them for a permanent solution. Remember - you're working with them to figure out what's best for your district and team!

Re: Team use of Petty Cash?
 

Having more than 1 method of acquiring parts and/or covering expenses is something that all teams should work towards.
If we only relied on PO's to get stuff done, we'd wait weeks to get parts, which isnt ideal during build season, for sure.

Open PO's, petty cash accounts, external sponsors/partners, and use of own credit card with quick reimbursement are all great ideas.:)

Our team does all of the above with the addition of a Procurement Card (P-card) from the school, checking account with local school account allocated for Robotics team, and an endowment type fund. It is more than enough to cover everything we encounter before, during and after build season, including travel expenses incurred at competitions.

Re: Team use of Petty Cash?
 

Thank you so much to everyone that posted ... your suggestions and info will definitely help me to work with the District to keep us building robots for many FIRST seasons to come!

Thanks again!

Re: Team use of Petty Cash?
 

If you do use petty cash for purchases you should look into getting the school districts Tax ID number as well, our district has a form you get from the bookkeeper or off the intranet.