I am dealing with a situation this coming season that will require payments for FIRST championships (in case we qualify to go) at the start of the school year. If we do not qualify and end up with a $5k surplus in our FIRST budget, we would end up with $5k excess funds in our account at the end of the season. For reasons imposed on the team, we will not be allowed to re-grant these funds anywhere after the season, and I was wondering if the excess funds would be able to simply roll over to the 2024-25 season if we were to keep the funds in the account, or is re-granting of excess funds at the end of the year obligatory?
As a follow-up question, is there a limit to the amount of funds we can keep in the account for such a roll-over?
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Reach out to FIRST’s financial department directly regarding this to see if they can accommodate you. Leaving funding in your team account after the close of the fiscal year risks that funding being forfeited to FIRST.
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To my knowledge, the funds should roll over. I believe that is how it worked for us this year with a little extra that we had.
I would love for someone to fact check me on this, losing money, especially a lot of money is no fun.
Edit: may be wrong, we might have gotten it regranted to our account next year? Sorry i’m hazy on this, so disregard me for now
Regrants are typically for unused portions of grants paid directly to FIRST from a company. The regrant docs (last updated Sept 2022) don’t mention simply overpaying. Definitely would email FIRST directly.
I’ve heard mostly of success with teams that reach out directly to HQ for their unique accounting needs. Generally I think the line is that if they can technically do it and you ask them in advance, they’ll try to accommodate you.
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As a general policy of First, any grants/gifts at the end of the season becomes a unrestricted gift to First. So no to the funds automatically rolling over. You have special case. I would ask at this email [email protected] if any acceptations or accommodations can be made.
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To the best of my knowledge, any money left in the FIRST account is forfeited sometime after the season unless you regrant it. My team usually regrants Twice we do it once our district registration is paid for, we regrant for build season funds and after worlds incase we had anything left over.
The unfortunate part is when companies gift restricted funds to your team after the due date of registration for events like the championship. John Deere donated funds for Championship without us knowing they would, and that funding basically goes poof because we can’t regrant it or use it to register for the next season.
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We were able to regrant restricted funds? To my knowledge if you pay a single penny of ANY registration cost with non-restricted funding you lose all restricted funds, we were lucky, and registration was fully covered by restricted grants and we immediately regranted everything in case we made it to DCMP so the funds wouldn’t be locked up.
Yea, we received multiple grants this season directly to our FIRST account and most of them were unrestricted. In paying our Championship registration by the due date we used unrestricted funds because it was what we had at the time.
Ill be honest we didn’t pay on time and told our district leadership (North Carolina) that we were expecting restricted grants and they lets us slide for the 2-ish weeks we needed to wait for John Deere and other to hit the account. And at our Mentor Meeting for the State they encouraged if we were waiting on funds to not pay. Im not sure if you might be able to do the same in PCH?
John’s problem was he was unaware the JD was going to do a grant with restricted funds. If you know you are getting a grant you come talk to First accounting and get an extension. In PCH, like most districts, you don’t know if you qualify for champs until after the week 6 championship.
Right, but I’m not talking about grants/gifts that fall into the Restricted (or even Unrestricted) category. I’m talking in this case about a credit card payment to pay the expected balance for events.
The issue with regranting, in this case, is that any regrant is required to go to a nonprofit “entity” and it’s officially registered address, in this case required to go to the school district. However, funds received by the district in this way are put back into their district’s general fund and do not get reallocated to the team (yes, we have tried to discuss this and no, the the district does not allow a pathway to put funds back into a team account or allocation, this has burned us before). Similarly, the school forbids us from sending these funds to a different nonprofit that they are not in control of.
I’m reaching out to FIRST for options…