Tracking monies.

[SenorZ]

I'm a new mentor to my team (2nd year team) because I'm new to the school. At my old school we had an FRC team, and I pretty much handled the financial stuff, tracked deposits and expenditures, collected receipts, and submitted for reimbursements from our account.
At my new school we have an ASB account (which we don't really use much) and an Ed Foundation account, a student financial officer (who's learning ropes and graduating this year), and a parent financial advisor (who hasn't been doing a lot of advising). We have multiple mentors making purchases, including myself, and we're not doing the best of jobs keeping track of everything... mainly because everyone is working hard on the robot and their schooling/jobs.

What do most teams use to keep track of all the expenses? We have a (in my opinion) convoluted spreadsheet system that I'm in the process of rebuilding from the ground up. Is there a preferred software? website? ledger book?

I'm looking forward at post-build season stuff to do with students, and when they elect a new board of directors I want to work with the new financial officer on a system that will work without hassel. Any advice is appreciated.

[richwong]

I track all funds for the team. We maintain a Google Doc for all purchase requests. I review and make purchases daily with a school credit card.

I track all income and expenditures in an Excel spreadsheet. I generate the robot Bill of Material (BOM) from the same spreadsheet. The spreadsheet also helps us identify where our funds our going so we can report back to the school and foundations that give us grants, etc.

There are occasions where mentors will buy items on their own for immediate need. I always ask for receipts so we can make sure we track the parts for our BOM, and also reimburse the mentor.

[SenorZ]

A debit card for our school account would be amazing. Having all $ go in/out through one person is an important starting point.
I'm also going to try getting a student to work with me on building an inventory database for material purchases and use, so a BOM can be exported quickly.
Thanks for the input.

[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

[DonRotolo]

We use Google Docs to keep track of purchases, and store receipt images there as well.

One person is the purchasing agent, and places all orders. The head coach is the agent's deputy in case he's unavailable. The PA verifies we don't already have the requested item(s), and tries to locate better pricing. McMaster is convenient but expensive...

A coach puts everything on his credit card, and the spreadsheet and images are used to request reimbursement from the school.

Next year, we also want to implement the position of receiving clerk. This person checks in all received orders, follows up when there are problems (underage, overage, order not received, etc), and keeps students accountable for received items they use.

[treffk]

We(I) used to keep a ledger and excel sheet of all incoming and outgoing funds on top of what the school tracked themselves so I could verify nothing was being pulled for other school activities. This was a big deal for us because even though we are listed as a school program(allowing us to be under their 501c3) they do not (normally) support us financially. All reciepts were to be turned into me and I copied all of them and submitted a copy to the school for reimbursement. This also helped when it came to do the BOM because I generally got to do it the night before competition based on receipts since I am usually non-technical/non-engineering.

Since I have graduated the team has stopped having a student track funds due to lack of interest from the students. I'd prefer we keep a record ourselves so we have copies of everything and have a quick list of all sponsors instead of having to get a printout of the funds from the school.

[SenorZ]

Thanks again for the input. We're using the Ed Foundation because they'll do reimbursements with receipts and a signature (from me). The school ASB account only wants to do POs, and even then can be a little too scrutinizing of what we want. The Ed Foundation money is ours, and no one can touch it. The ASB account is a school account, and the money is school money, which we don't like the sound of... especially if we're moving thousands of dollars around each year.