I'm not going to teach an account course here but you can get FIRST financial information here:
http://www.usfirst.org/who/content.aspx?id=78
The financial report is here:
http://www.usfirst.org/uploadedFiles...Financials.pdf
This might be a good project to visit an accounting teacher or mentor and learn more about how this works.
If you look at the balance sheet on the date the report was issued they did have 8M in cash and equivalents. They also had 8M in liabilities.
On the income and expense report they had a net income of 1.1+ M on revenues of 24.5 M. You need to have some headroom on the income or you can't pay the bills. A million bucks doesn't go very far these days, not like 50 years ago.
Now please draw your attention to the line item for FRC expenses - it is $ 17 M which works out to roughly $ 11,333 per FRC team. There was only 12.7 M in program registration fees, for ALL programs.
Where is the difference. Outside sponsors had to punch in 9.8 M to cover the shortfall.
Everyone now please hold up your hands and shout: THANK YOU FOR YOUR SPONSORSHIP !!!
Like I said before, whenever you are ready to start a team there are resources available to help become self sustaining.