Inessential Money Laundering (or, How SIPB finances work and how to spend SIPB's money.) As acting treasurer of the SIPB, I'm actually attempting to make the treasurer into a useful office by letting myself and others know how money and sipb work together. Section 1. MONEY DOESN'T GROW ON TREES. Well, for most people, it doesn't. The SIPB tends to have less of a cash-flow sort of problem to worry about that most organizations, since we don't actually have posession of any of our money. The SIPB's money comes from somewhere out of the I/S budget, through negotiations with Kathy Allen. (Kind of like the SIPB's hardware tends to come from somewhere out of I/S, after which negotiations are made to rearrange parts of the budget for the parts of I/S involved...) In general, reasonable SIPB-related expenditures that we approve during a meeting will be ok'd by Kathy. There isn't really a fixed amount of money we can or can't spend. Examples of reasonable expenditures: buying a book or manual, buying office supplies, buying a 486 after we've decided that it's worth buying. Examples of unreasonable expenditures: buying the Chair a car, buying a patrol gun for every member of the office... you get the idea. Subsection 1a. Kathy Allen Kathy Allen is Jim Bruce's (MIT VP of I/S) assistant, her office is room 10-219. She's the same person who does things like sign sipb member's keycards so they can get keys to the office. She does helpful things for SIPB. We appreciate this. fnord. You are not being brainwashed. Section 2. WHO DECIDES TO SPEND MONEY Money is allocated at a SIPB meeting when members decide we need to buy something. Usually, the process is something like this: one member suggests, sometimes under treas. report or sometimes under a report relevant to what they want to buy. "I think we need to buy ." Flamage may or may not ensue over whether we really need to buy . Hopefully the chair cuts this flamage short. Unless the need to buy has been massively flamed to the ground, someone makes a motion to allocate up to $ for purchasing . The motion is seconded and voted on. If the motion passes, then someone gets to deal with purchasing , knowing that SIPB will, in fact, pay for it. (see subsection 3b for details) Section 3. WHAT WE SPEND MONEY ON AND HOW WE SPEND IT Most of the things we spend money on are things that we allocate money for at a meeting when someone decides we need them. (See section 2.) However, there are a few things that don't fit this category. Subsection 3a. VMA Accounts You know those little forms that exist somewhere in the office that you're supposed to know about in case someone ever comes in and says "I want a VMA account?" If not, you've probably never been to an election meeting, where such trivia occasionally comes up when asking a member gratuitious questions. Anyway, it isn't likely to matter much, since VMA accounts seem to be a dinosaur sort of thing. (You might notice that nobody ever *does* come into the office and say "I want a VMA account...) Anyway, back when VMA accounts were more popular, SIPB started "sponsoring" them for any users who were interested and filled out a form. The reason that the accounts need sponsors is because there's a fee for them. Which is where the Treasury comes in. there are a number of vma accounts that we currently sponsor. most of them don't get used. this means that we pay a small fee for sponsoring n vma accounts, but we don't actually pay for very much cpu time, since people aren't really using them. (if people were using them, we'd pay for the cpu time.) We get billed for the vma accounts, and it's taken by some magic involving Kathy Allen from our "budget." The treasurer gets to deal. yay. Subsection 3b. Meeting-Approved Expenditures So SIPB decides we're going to buy something. Now how do we actually get it? There are two basic ways this can happen. Both of them involve someone volunteering to deal. subsubsection 3bi. The Reimbursement Approach A SIPB member goes out and spends his or her own money to buy the item approved at the meeting. They want to get reimbursed, funny that. In order for reimbursment to happen, they MUST get a receipt for this expenditure. No receipt, no reimbursement. This means that they are perfectly welcome to donate their own pocket money to buy a book for SIPB, never get a receipt, and never complain about it. But that's a rather stupid thing to do, since they could get reimbursed. If someone plans to use the reimbursement approach, it might be nice for them to tell the treasurer, "hey, i'm going to spend my money to buy this. I'll bring you a receipt and I'll want to be reimbursed." If the treasurer actually succeeds in getting a proper receipt out of this person, \footnote{A receipt can be a proper store receipt, or something signed by the person you bought it from (if, say, sipb were buying a book off of a member, the member could write a note saying "I sold to the Student Information Processing Board for and sign it. * (this doesn't mean members should lose their receipts, and then have sipb buy their own personal off of them so they could then be reimbured. ie, if you do it, I probably won't reimburse you, nor will Kathy Allen.)}, the treasurer will then hand this stuff over to Kathy Allen, who will grumble a bit, deal with a bunch of paperwork that MIT requires, and eventually get the money back to the person who's supposed to be reimbursed. subsubsection 3bii) The Requisiton Approach The SIPB Req Book is in the filing cabinets in the back of the office, in a drawer labeled "administrative stuff". To buy something using a Req, the first step is to fill one out. You can look at the carbon copies of previous req's to figure out the format. (The "date needed by" box should be left blank.) After filling out the appropriate parts of the Req, the person buying something should then bring it to Kathy Allen. Kathy will then (we hope) say, "OK, cool, the SIPB is going to buy . This looks reasonable." Then Kathy will sign the Req and deal with getting the person buying something a Purchase Order. A purchase order is MIT's basic way of buying stuff from the outside world. You go to a store, give them MIT's purchase order, and they are supposed to give you the appropriate stuff. MIT will then pay them for the appropriate amount after the stuff is recieved. (so it's like giving them a check that you won't let them cash until they provide the goods, effectively.) Stores really do have a clue about these Purchase Orders, apparently. The person then takes the purchase order to the store and gets the stuff, and hopefully all is well and happy. And Kathy is happy because this method causes her less hassle and paperwork in the long run. If you are buying a book from Quantum, it's a little bit different, because there's a deal worked out with quantum where we have a standing purchase order balance. With the appropriate information, which you should ask the treasurer for before buying stuff from quantum, you can basically go into quantum and say "please subtract this charge from the sipb purchase order" and they will do appropriately. When this credit at quantum runs out, the treasurer makes sure we allocate more money to quantum so we can keep doing it that way. I assume this was done because of the frequency that we tend to need to buy books from quantum. Section 4: What about the random cruft i want to buy that's cheap but probably won't be approved by Kathy since it's kind of irrelevant to SIPB or computing The SIPB budget doesn't allow for this stuff. Well, at least not the treasurer-type SIPB budget. Right now there exists a "slush fund" made up of random petty cash that arises from things like auctions to sell the junk that (surprise) accumulates in the office, which is, effectively, and account with Cokecomm. To spend "slush fund" money, a motion needs to be made in the meeting, just like to spend "real" money.