I know this subject is boring, especially when it comes to the main attraction in the FRC. But I haven’t seen any threads about the financial aspects of managing a team, so here is one.
I’ll start with some questions:
How do you organize your team’s wish list? How do you collect the information? Do you process it in any special way?
How do you go about purchasing goods for your team? Do you organize purchasing waves/bursts? Or do you just buy whenever.
How do you keep track of expenses and revenue? An improvised sheet or an organized database? Do you keep invoices? If so, how?
Do you analyze your team’s expenses for spending habit improvement?
If you want to elaborate on your team’s system or ask you’re own questions, feel free to do so.
We have a shopping list that anyone on the team can access. Items get added with the name of the purchaser (single person), the subteam the cost is associated with, name of the part, price, quantity, and sourcing link. Our LM1 purchases items, moving them from the shopping list to a purchased list, with the date the purchase was made. If it’ll take more than a day or two, tracking/ETAs get edited in.
Things get purchased every week or so, unless you request that it gets purchased sooner - then it can get ordered the same day. Orders are marked with a priority - some stuff will stay on the shopping list for weeks, waiting for another order from the same vendor. Other stuff gets pushed through with next day shipping in emergencies, bypassing other items.
The placed orders get used as the basis for our expense tracking. These, plus other non-shopping list expenses, are added to a ledger. Income is also tracked here, and then everything is reconciled by expense category. Receipts are all kept and attached to the ledger as well.
Yes - we track changes in spending category over time, and use that to inform fundraising, spending caps, and larger investments in capital.
In addition to this, we have an actual wishlist of stuff (working on converting it to a web page right now, WIP) that we don’t plan on buying with our current budget, but are great items to fundraise for. A sponsor offers us up to $10k, but wants to know what it will be spent on? Great! We have a list of projects ranging from $2,500 or $250,000 that they can browse. Conveniently, we happen to want a new machine that is exactly $9,000, plus an additional $1,000 in tooling and materials!
Members enter items into a google sheet. The lead mentor updates the status field to ordered and then to received as appropriate. A budget is set in Autumn, so if purchases are needed and the subteam is under budget they very much tend to happen.
Lead mentor balanced urgency with consolidating shipping costs to decide.
I don’t know this one
Each year the Leadership Core sets a budget based on forecasted needs, past year’s expenses and expected funding. I’m unsure what habit improvements we might consider?
[edit] still not sure what you’re asking here but I have thought of one activity that I have no interest in doing: second guessing sourcing of build season purchases. That is, no tears will be shed by me if someone points out that the Rotary Splined Robo-Encabulators we bought in January from known reliable vendor with good shipping times were available for 10% less at Bob’s Bait and Roboteria who we know nothing about. We can consider Bob as a possible vendor later in the year.
A strategic “wish list” spreadsheet, rather similar to what Isaiah referred to… though this is really at the non-profit level rather than the team level
There’s a spreadsheet that has “everything” in it, that is updated with a “wanted this fiscal year” number based on the team budget and is a rough first guess. This also has how many we own, which is updated perhaps twice a year (June/Dec) for consumables. We’re working on adding a column to this spreadsheet with a link to where each item is usually purchased, to provide a bit of a “master material sourcing list”
A document containing an “immediate” shopping list. The latter doc has “Requested”, “Ordered”, “Shipped”, “Received” as sections in the doc.
Identical to john3928. The lead mentors tend to order, and it balances urgency with consolidating shipping costs. (Shopping tends to be consolidated to a few people since we end up with tax exemptions that are usually attached to only a few accounts)
We’re part of a larger non-profit, so everything is in QuickBooks. This includes images of every receipt, so things can be reconstructed or recategorized later, if necessary.
Yes and no? We have many mentors with 10+ years of experience, so we have pretty good instincts of what these things cost. We were $400 off our budget last year, which I consider dramatic success. We also have QuickBooks with historical data, so we can do year-to-year comparisons (and put the budget into QuickBooks to help us compare as we go along during the year). So I’m not sure there’s much to optimize from an expense perspective.
Our overall process looks something like this:
We have a yearly budget that has to be approved by the non-profit board, which is where the first pass spreadsheet mentioned above serves a purpose. This is done originally around September, and updated in December once we know what travel we have for competition.
We largely organize in the following categories: (1) Office Supplies (2) Small Tools & Equipment (3) Program Registration (4) Robot Competition Infrastructure [think wood field walls, or FLL fields for FLL teams, etc.] (5) Robot Parts (6) Supplies and Materials (7) Non-Robot supplies (8) Travel. (There’s also a facility fee charged by the non-profit to cover things like insurance, shared computers, rent & utilities)
#5 items are durable (e.g. robot motors, gears) while #6 represents consumables (e.g. bolts, aluminum tube, etc). #7 would include things like t-shirts, which are effectively consumed when handed out.
This breakout helps us get a good handle on changes over time. In general, We would expect (2) and (5) to have a huge peak at team startup (we’re in year 2 of this team) and go down somewhat over time. (Though new more powerful motors, etc. mean it will never get to zero.). We’d expect #6 to really be relatively flat year over year. #7 and #8 scale directly with # of students.
It’s taken a few forms over the years but I’m a big fan of a two-tab spreadsheet with…
Tab 1 - Budget & Actual Spend by Category
Tab 2 - Receipts (with quantity, description, and categorization)
Use some excel wizardry to auto-tally entries from tab 2 into actual spend in tab 1.
I’m sure this probably makes some accountants shutter, but I like it as a one-stop-shop for questions of:
How much have we spent, and on what?
How much did we plan to spend, and on what?
How much of (xyz category) do we have available to spend?
Budget includes two major sections - Income and Expenses (again, each line having a predicted and actual entry). Under each of those, sub- and sub-sub categories.
Still takes a dedicated person to make sure all the receipt info is entered right and on-time. We’ve experimented with a google form for collecting this, with some success (but not total success).
Having a 501c3 tied to the team is starting to change our answers to the others. Really, we’re pushing away from ad-hoc ordering and discord discussions to more formal wish-lists, so we have the ammo to go to sponsors and ask for donations for specific outcomes.
IMO in all of this, the recipie for success is having the info visible to anyone who wants it within the team, but still with a dedicated individual responsible for keeping it up to date and accurate.
This is an excellent plan. Seems like we’re seeing more sponsors / grantors coming to us and asking for specific items to fund. I think it would behoove most teams to have a list of specific projects in a variety of cost ranges ready to talk about. Some potential examples:
Big equipment (lathe, CNC, laser cutter, mill, etc) and how it would enhance your kids’ learning.
Technology upgrades (Swerve, Vision, Brushless, etc) and how …
Outreach projects (a specific donation like this helped us start up our FLL Summer Camp program)
Travel (I know of a small town team that qualified for Worlds, but didn’t think they could afford to go, but their community businesses stepped in to make it happen)
I think a good model for you to keep in mind is that finance and accounting are adjacent but different activities. To use a sports analogy
Accounting is like a a field referee in that their focus is following the rules and reporting what actually happened accurately
Finance is like a sideline coach trying to improve performance, which is built on a foundation of factual understanding of what actually happened
Last year our team started a 501c3 to support the team. Here is how things work
My wife owns an accounting firm which acts as the non profits CPA (bookkeeping and tax filing) and maintains a quickbooks for the 501c3
One BIG item in or organization is no one person does everything financially. Our 501c3 treasurer receives the bank statements and can sign checks but does not make accounting entries. Our CPA can’t sign checks and never deposits them.
Our 501c3 president has an excel sheet with our planned budget (expenses and revenues) that keeps track of our 501c3, our school account (michigan team so there is ~$6k from the state department of education), and first account to have a total picture of resources available.
The “wish list” is driven by the team,
there is a list of stuff from our lead mentor of possible robot expenditures for this year
There are “big asks” that the 501c3 wants to fund - a new pit setup & a half sized regulation practice field,
Operationally the 501c3 targets having enough cash on hand at the end of the competitive season to fully build next years robot which means if the team wants to buy something there is cash on hand to get it anytime.
Our “finance” function has engaged on a few of our major projects to drive down costs
the new pit setup started as “lets get a super pit” and I think the cost was $14k after discussion the super pit isn’t where we want to go because they are incredibly heavy which creates safety concerns and logistics complications. We schemed up a different way to design a pit setup that was budgeted at $6k. Subsequently we think that number can be pushed down by getting some elements from a vendor that will give us a 50% discount, going from a custom built item to a stock COTS item we’ll do some minor surgery on. I think our total costs will be under $3k now, $10k under what we thought it would be from critical thinking and sourcing.
Travel to worlds has been a big finance planning function as well - two years ago our travel costs $2k out of pocket for team members, total over $40k, and mentors mostly due to $1200 last minute airline tickets. Last year we rented a bus and got another team to share some seats and cost on the bus and cut that in half. This year we’ve got some plans to push those costs down even more.
Last year our 2nd largest donor was a local billionaire’s stem educational charity, we plan to go back to them this year with asks to fund some specific purchases because we believe that will be more successful because we are making specific asks.