What Does Treasurer Do?

The roles as defined in the constitution can be found here. In this section I will breakdown what that looks like in practice. Specifically, I want break down the role into two areas: day-to-day tasks and high level planning. (maybe a third? an administration component)

Day-to-Day Tasks

1. Audit purchase request from team members

   1. You are the “gatekeeper” to team members wishing to place orders. Without your approval, nothing will get ordered.

   2. Every purchase made with SGA money must go through a submission process in campus groups. You job is NOT just to approve every request, but to look at the request and check for any errors before approving.

      1. At first this can be tedious. But, after a couple of them you get a feel for what to look for and the process will only take a couple minutes. On average, I spend less than 5 minutes from opening the campus groups workflow to approving the request (or messaging the person who submitted it if there is an issue.)

   3. For items ordered using money not from SGA, Rocketry is setup so that each project manager will submit a purchase request to Lee Dagle (her office is next to Tom’s) via email with the treasurer CC’d.

      1. You do not have to explicitly audit this request and they do not wait on your approval. But you should stay in the loop about what rocketry groups are purchasing.

   4. When auditing a purchase request you are looking for the following things:

      1. Check that the links provided to purchase an item work. Is the link valid

      2. Check that the item, and quantity, is in stock

      3. Check that the price listed on the website matches the price listed in our budget (e.g did someone make a typo and budget $25 for a $250 part).

         1. It will ultimately come back to be YOUR problem to sort out if something big enough like this happens (trust me…). It is MUCH better to take the few minutes and check things as you go.

      4. Check that shipping is accounted for on the teams budgeting spreadsheet

         1. You can adjust the price of the item on our budgeting spreadsheet to account for shipping or including a separate line for shipping.

      5. If there are notes in the “note column” of the spreadsheet, read them. Do they make sense?

      6. TLDR: You job is to check that the information provided enough to actually order the item AND is the cost that a person budgeted for the item correct.

2. Keep the budgeting spreadsheet updated

   1. This is mostly achieved through auditing the purchase request

   2. Periodically perform a self-audit the spreadsheet

      1. clean up formatting. It sounds stupid, but a clean looking spreadsheet is easier to use and less prone to error (which makes your job easier)

      2. lee will send you updates of what she thinks our budget is. Our budgets should be close to matching.

3. Find solutions for budgeting issues

   1. A team member will eventually have a question or issue regarding either purchasing an item or an item that was purchases. Your job is to try to help solve whatever the issue is. This is very vague and open ended. However, normally, the solution involves working with Lee Dagle and she is your first person to contact.

      1. Examples of this included: item lost in shipping, item damaged upon arrival, or an item has a non-standard ordering process like eggtimer rocketry, for example.

4. Work with USLI to plan competition travel

   1. You job is NOT to plan the USLI competition trip. However, by nature of dealing with money, you will need to be in the loop on their travel and its costs. You will likely be asked to look over their travel plans and if the team can afford their plans. You will likely need to work with them to submit a funding request from SGA or the BIC.

      1. Note: lee is a fantastic resource for travel and will help you every step of the way! The import part is to start travel planning early and work with Lee!

High Level Planning

I’m going to break this into things that are done once at the beginning or end of the year and things that are done throughout the year.

Once a Year

1. Set budgets for each rocketry subteam

   1. e.g the USLI team gets XXX amount. RPL gets XXX amount, and so on.

   2. This will require spending time meeting with sub teams to understand their goals and what funding they need. And then decide what funding we can give.

      1. This probably should be done at the beginning and / or end of summer.

      2. If this is done thoughtfully and well, you should not need to adjust these numbers all year

         1. For example, for the 2023 year I sent roughly 5-10 hours at the end of the summer meeting with sub team leads and drafting our budget. And then I did not touch those numbers all year

2. Represent the team at the SGA budgeting meeting in the spring

3. Request a budget from the BIC

Ongoing

1. Organize and push for team donation events

   1. Make use of the givesmart page to get donations throughout the year

2. Push teams produce updated media for you to use in sponsorship recruiting efforts

3. Plan ahead for raising additional funds

   1. Having a timeline for OTFR’s

      1. SEDS conference travel

      2. USLI competition travel

      3. Starting in 2024 OTFR’s will be less reliable and should not be counted on for more than 50% of travel.

   2. Working with the office of institutional advancement to reach out to sponsors and ask for donations

   3. You need to be up-to-date and in the loop to know how much money we need and when we need it by

4. Update the sponsorship package as needed

   1. Updating the bi-monthly newsletter is also a good. It is a nice visual piece to distribute.

Time Commitment ~1h weekly

I’d estimate that on an average week I spend 30 minutes on rocketry treasurer day-to-day tasks plus the time during the rocketry officer meeting

1. Some weeks will be busy and might be multiple hours

   1. USLI travel planning

   2. Submitting an OTFR

   3. Major bulk order for RPL or USLI

2. If you constantly take shortcuts or get lazy you will make a lot of additional work for yourself

   1. For example, If you don’t make sure people are updating the budgeting sheet with the actual item costs. You will eventually have to sit down, go through everything, and find out what items are right and wrong

   2. Basically, “tech debt” is your biggest enemy. Try to catch any budget errors and dependencies early and often. Otherwise they can become hard to track down

3. The high level planning tasks take an additional ~2 hours a week

   1. This varies a lot though. Some weeks are 0 and some weeks are 5 or more hours

   2. It depends on what initiatives are currently being worked on and what is need of them

What and How: One Time Funding Requests (OTFR)

Things to document (not complete)

Common Issues (and attempted solutions):

• ordering things in a timely manner

• keeping track of things that are received

• Knowing where received things are located

documentation for future treasurers.

1. How SGA budget process works

   1. spring budget and Tiers

   2. buckets

2. How bic budget works

3. how business account works

   1. Donation link for comp teams

   2. donating through main rose link

4. Sponsors

   1. Go through bret

5. Campus groups budget layout

6. Submitting purchase request

7. Submitting OTFR

8. Writing a check?

9. What address for shipping packages?

10. Procedure for ordering / shipping motors

11. Ordering t shirts

12. Student trip leader

13. Inter dept payment

14. We payed for airbnb from bic budget in advance and then submitted an OTFR to pay back the BIC