[ScottOliveira]

Our team (3455) has encountered significant problems with the FIRST financial system this season, and I wanted to vent a little and see if other teams also had issues.

Our sponsors all donated their money to the team's FRC account and we were planning on going through the normal process of requesting a regrant, and getting the balance of the account transferred to us in order to be able to make purchases this year. One of the teachers from our team submitted the regrant request in early December, as he had done in previous years, and didn't worry. He has the fax transmission sheet to show that the request did in fact go through.

Come beginning of January, we had still not received money. The same teacher who had submitted the regrant (and who handles all of the team's financials) was worried and called the FIRST financial department in the first week of January. It turns out they had lost the regrant request, so all of the team's money was still sitting there. The teacher filled out another request and submitted, and received email confirmation that they had in fact received the request.

Fast forward another week and a half and still no money. At this point we are starting to encounter problems, because the team doesn't have money to start ordering some of the parts we wanted. The teacher follows up again and finds that the finance department is moving slow. After several more follow up sessions he finally gets the message that the check is in the mail. That was a week ago, and we still do not have money.

Some of the parts we were looking at were coming from a distributor at a total of about ~$1000 (for all the parts combined, not one item) and there were not many other options to acquire them. Talking with the distributor, some of the items we wanted have a lead time of ~1-2 weeks. We knew we wanted these pieces three weeks ago, when there was plenty of time to order them and integrate them into our robot. However because of the lack of funds, we were not able to order them.

Because we were not able to order what we needed, we have had to scrap weeks of design and work, and redo large sections of our robot. We are now designing a system using only what is available, that will not perform as we had originally hoped. FIRST's mishandling of the finances has prevented us from competing as we had planned.

It seems to me that when it is the FIRST organization itself that is hindering how teams work, there is a serious problem. Has anyone else had trouble with them, and had difficulty getting their money regranted?