Money Matters
A crucial part of the successful delivery of a Competition Program is good money management. The Trustees impart a great degree of freedom on the Core Team and in exchange the Core Team must take responsibility, amongst other things, for ensuring that money is well managed. To help minimise risk for everyone involved, certain requirements are placed upon the Core Team related to money.
The Core Team must draw up a budget for the Competition Program that they are looking to deliver and all spending must be made within this most recently approved budget. It is the responsibility of the Core Team Treasurer to liaise with the Trustees to get a budget approved and to get further approval for certain modifications to a previously approved budget.
Budgeting Requirements
The Trustees are ultimately responsible for how the Charity spends its money. The task of budgeting for a Competition Program is delegated to the Core Team and the Core Team must in turn comply with these requirements.
The budget must not be publicly available. This is to avoid suppliers being able to know exactly how much the Charity has to spend on a given service/product.
The Trustees must approve a budget before any spending is made towards a Competition Program.
The Trustees must approve any increase in the total of a previously approved budget.
The Trustees must approve any reallocation of funds between budget lines where the amount being reallocated is greater than £1000. The Core Team is free to reallocate funds between budget lines below this threshold.
The budget maintained by the Core Team, as a minimum, must include the following information for each budget line. It may prove helpful to organise budget lines in a hierarchical fashion (where only the leaves of the tree are budget lines and the internal nodes are used to group budget lines).
Short name.
Description (ideally with some information as to how the amount was determined).
Amount.
It is advised to include a 10-20% overesitmate in each budget line to allow for unforeseen changes in cost.
The Core Team must define and operate a system of authorising spends against lines in an approved budget. Volunteers must never spend their own money expecting reimbursement without some prior agreement from the Core Team or a delegate of the Core Team.
At the time of writing, only the Trustees have access to the Student Robotics bank account. Therefore, for the time being, all reimbursement claims must go via the nominated Trustee Treasurer. It is the responsibility of the Core Team Treasurer to ensure that evidence of purchase (receipt/invoice) and a record of the spend against specific budget line(s) is recoded for each transaction. This information must not be made public for the same reason as the budget not being made public (it is also likely to include personal information such as addresses). The Trustee Treasurer may request access to this information.
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