Money Management

[mathking]

One thing I would suggest looking into is seeing if your school district can create open purchase orders with your suppliers. We do this with the school account for McMaster-Carr and AndyMark. Before the season starts we get the PO set up by the school treasurer, who contacts the vendors and sets up POs for a given maximum amount. Then when we have an order during the season she faxes it in to the vendors. This works well for us.

[Jimmy Nichols]

Our PO system is even more open. I can place the purchases or our teacher place the purchases online and reference the PO number that we have open with the vendor. We do this for McMaster, Andymark, Grainger, Local Metal Store, and our T-shirt vendor.

If you wanted to go the 501c3 route, we started down that path and realized the trouble it was going to be since we don't have anyone who was interested in helping managing the accounts, as far as taxes, audits, etc. What we did was get hooked up with our local Community Foundation within our school district. We opened up a Fund within their group. All donations to our fund are for our fund to use, all donations are 501c3 through their organization. They charge a measily 2% annually for managing the fund as far as cutting checks, PO's, audits, etc. They also gave us the option to invest some fo the money to be able to make money with out money, which should cover the annual fee. It was a win win for us. Now we will be able to better support the FRC team and we will use the group to support local FLL and FTC teams as well.