[eedoga]

Money has always been a problem for my team. I am the lead mentor and for the most part I have been working pretty much on my own. I realized this year that that was mostly my fault. Parents didn't know that they could do more, so they didn't. I also work for a school district that uses purchase orders for everything, and won't do reimbursement for school expenditures. Waiting three weeks for a purchase order to process does not work well with FIRST Robotics. So I ended up paying for a lot of the robot out of pocket...By a lot I mean over $2k a year.

Long story short, Things came to a head last year and I had to change the way things worked on the team. Most importantly I asked my parents for help. The parents have totally stepped up this year and formed a booster club. They handle all the money! Because they are not a part of the school district the can reimburse me for purchases.

I do all the purchasing and enter the receipts into a spreadsheet. I then hand the receipts and spreadsheets to the parents and they reimburse me for the money that I have spent.

Having one person do all the buying helps a lot because it keeps a team from spending money twice.

Best of luck this year.

Edoga