One note: this post is not to "call out" people for making mistakes in finances. In fact, the entirety of things I disprove of in this post are mistakes I've made in the past and I've learned from. My goal is to try and give the advice I wish I had when I started taking on more responsibilities.
Another note: I'll be discussing my time at the University of Iowa and the institutions they had there. Every school is different though with how they structure their club administration and finances, so you may not have the same experience I've had.
Part 0: Some Vocabulary
Before I jump right in, I want to establish some terms that I use throughout this post just to make sure anyone from the experienced community member to the newest quiz bowl team can use the guide.
Housewrites are typically one-of tournaments in which a team of writers and editors produce a single set for a year. Some housewrites are run with the same or similar teams from year to year (Penn Bowl, EFT, etc), but they are different from being paid like a normal job because the payment typically comes after the set is being done played (usually at the end of the academic competition year).
Mirror Fees are a portion of a host school's income from a tournament they pay to the writers/editors of the set they used in return for allowing them to use the set for a tournament. Mirror fees can vary: for high school sets, they're typically between 10 and 20 dollars per team, whereas for college sets, they're closer to the 40 to 50 dollars for a team range.
Part 1: Why are finances and methods around them important?
At the local level, quiz bowl is largely a non-profit activity, and most of the money spent within the game stays within the community. Teams pay other schools to attend tournaments, and most of those funds typically stay within the club and are paid out to attend other tournaments. Mirror fees pay writers, staffers, and sustain large organizations like NAQT and ACF which in turn provide the highest quality of events in the game.
With this being said, being prompt and delivering payments in full is vital for keeping the community alive. Let's say, for instance, I run a mirror of the tournament ABC, and one team hasn't paid me yet for a few weeks. This becomes an issue because I have to pay the mirror fees for the tournament to ABC's team. If I don't do this promptly, then ABC has to wait to pay their writers and editors. Because of the way quiz bowl is structured with tournaments run throughout the year garnering money, this already means writers have to wait almost a year from set completion to pay day, so trying to speed up this process as much as possible if much appreciated and courteous to writers.
This one team now paying creates a dilemma for the host. I could pay all of the mirror fees to complete my end of the deal for using the set without the team's payment; however, I'd be cutting into the money I'd have saved up, which could mean I can't afford to send a team to a tournament soon. Or, I could keep pestering this other team for the money, which slows down the payment time for writers. Clearly, these issues would be resolved by prompt payment, however, as I'm about to discuss, this isn't always an issue of people being "lazy" and not paying. There are significant time sinks and barriers to teams for paying tournaments at an administrative level.
Part 2: What difficulties exist in doing club finances?
For context, I spent three years doing finances for the University of Iowa's club team. My freshman year was the first year we had gotten serious about playing and started attending tournaments. I had to figure out the infrastructure to doing club administrative activities (finances being one of them). And let me say, oh my god, it was horrendous.
How Iowa works is that there was a Student Activities Office which authorized and worked with clubs like ours. A separate entity we worked with was the Student Business Office, which managed the finances of clubs. These were two different institutions with different people.
On top of that, the way finances worked at Iowa was that the University collected student activities fees as part of tuition, which was then given to the Student Government to create a fund of over $1 million to then distribute to the organization. The way this distribution was done was that there is a Finance Committee to which organizations could make requests. The committee reviewed requests every two weeks as part of a system of funding periods, to which they would publish the dates. We had money in a university account every year that I was never really sure how/why it was there? But it was a good back-up fund.
So already there are three big organizations with different responsibilities our club had to work through. With that being said, there were a lot of hiccups. I'm going to list below the problems we as a club faced:
- Student Government was awful at communicating. My freshman year, they kept reviewing and returning our finance requests for ACF Nationals because they had questions and wouldn't approve the request until the questions were answered...to which we would respond immediately, but they would take a week to respond. By the time our request was approved to travel to Philadelphia for the tournament, plane costs were 4 times the amount we had originally requested, so we had to drive out there. I later discovered the chair of the Finance Committee was running for Student Body President and had ignored most of her responsibilities during this time.
- There was a large amount of paperwork to do. Now, this is something to get used to, as universities want to make sure their money is going to real activities and is being used to represent the University in a positive light. However, there was never a clear guide on what paperwork I needed when. For instance, sending a check for ACF Fall to Rice University this past year involved over 70 emails between me, the Business Office, and Rice to fill out paperwork, get signatures, and clarify things. This was frustrating for everyone involved.
- Student Government continually failed to clarify conditions around funding periods. This past year, they just never created a calendar for when the funding period began and ended every two weeks, so I missed out on creating an early enough request for one of our tournaments and had to pay out of pocket. Also, they failed to notify us of restrictions we could make per funding period on requests, so when I tried to correct the previous problem by making all our requests at the beginning of the year, we had requests denied, so I had to jump through extra hoops to make the money come through.
- Improper Communication with University Services
- Failure to plan deadlines and keep a calendar of both quiz bowl events and finance deadlines
- A lack of understanding of how University finances worked and the paperwork required
Now, it's time to turn around and discuss about what you CAN do to avoid these problems and have smooth sailing with your club's finances.
Communicate Effectively
The first step to success is figuring out what you need to do at your club to acquire and pay money according to University standards. There are people at your University whose sole job is to help you with this, and they have an office on campus you can either freely walk into to ask questions, or schedule an appointment to go in. Iowa had both of these. You need to reach out and understand how you can learn about finances - be it from previous club leadership who did the job before you, university organization, the leadership of other clubs on campus, student government, etc.
Simultaneously, if you're having issues or don't understand how to manage the finances between your club and another quiz bowl club or quiz bowl organization, please let them know this. Chances are, they can help you find a solution or give you more time to finalize a financial transaction. Do not go long stretches of time without communicating to people you owe money to, or that owe money to you. For example, when I was having trouble paying people through Iowa for staffing ACF Winter, I worked with ACF to send the money to them so they could pay the staffers. More often than not, if you're encountering a problem, there's a solution out there, and you just need to find someone who can help you fix it.
Make Friends
In doing finances, you interact with the same people at the University level, neighboring clubs, and national organizations. It definitely helps to make bonds with these people so you can cooperate better and that they're also more likely to help you out or go out of their way to help you. For instance, after helping saving our ACF Nationals trip, I gave a thank you card signed by our team to the Student Business Office workers who guided us through the administrative process. For the next two years, they were always very helpful in responding to emails or doing paperwork for us which I feel in a normal circumstance, they may have been less open to helping with or perhaps would have even denied. This is a minor step, but is like oil keeping the gears going.
Understand the Process
Here's the scary part: as a treasurer, you're expected to have a basic understanding of:
- How much money you have available
- How to access, receive, and send out that money
- How to raise money to fund events
- What additional paperwork you need to complete to send out money
Part 4: In-Depth Guide from Acquiring Money to Paying for a Tournament
I'll now relay the process I would go through at Iowa to pay for a tournament. Again, this may not be exactly what you have at your University, but may be similar.
1. Determine the tournament date, who is going, and the number of teams.
You need a price tag before you can pay! Try and plan at the beginning of your academic year what tournaments you want to attend and try to finalize at least a number of teams. Especially in recruiting semesters, a lot of people will sign up for events early, then drop. Put a cap on teams so you can get the finances in order ASAP. The cost of a team to attend a tournament can also include discounts based on things such as if the team is undermanned. DO NOT CREATE TEAMS FOR THE PURPOSE OF GETTING A DISCOUNT IF IT IS BASED ON COMPOSITION. This is a VERY slippery slope. I like to say this: make a request like you're not getting any discounts based on team composition (but factoring in things like distance, buzzers, etc), because you can always save or give back money to your club account.
2. Make a budget request to whoever give your organization funds, or put together money otherwise.
Now that I know how many teams and the basic details of the tournament, I could make a budget request to Student Government. They typically need a justification of what the event is, why you're going, what it will look like, etc. I like to talk about quiz bowl as an activity, mention our success or involvement of new players/undergrads, etc. It's a nice touch. You'll likely have to provide "proof of expense." This could be an invoice, or I've taken a screenshot of the forum post with costs listed and the tournament name clearly stated. At Iowa, funding requests needed to be submitted at least two weeks before the event takes place to make sure it was seen in a funding period. I know at Carleton College, for instance, their funding period is entirely at the beginning of one semester for the entire semester, so it's important to be prompt and get teams together for the semester based on your circumstances.
3. Complete other paperwork needed to authenticate and attend the tournament with Student Organization admin.
At Iowa, we needed to notify admin with a "Prior to Travel" form and the rosters of our teams before events so they could keep tabs on who was going in case of an emergency. Also, you want to make sure you're following all of the procedures of your University so you can pay out from University funds. I feel bad saying "be sure to complete the paperwork" again and again, but because every school is different, I can't establish more.
4. Find out BEFORE the tournament how you should pay.
Communicate with the host to see what payment methods are available and how they compare to what methods you have available. Typically, a check is the best way to go at Iowa, but we had access to digital payment options (but I advised against it since they took a fraction of our fees). At an in-person event, checks and cash are two things a host should be prepared to collect in accordance with University policy. For instance, I had to rent a lockbox from the Business Office and complete a paysheet to make sure all the money was legit. Paying with a third party app such as Venmo or PayPal differs from University to University. This is because the income from quiz bowl is shielded from taxes due to being a student organization activity. If it becomes personal/exchanges personal hands, it could be something those involved have to list on their taxes, which is not fun.
5. Play the tournament and pay ASAP.
If you're paying in cash or check, try and bring it to the tournament with you. Checks can also be sent in the mail, but are easy enough to get in hand if you plan out paying far enough before the tournament. If you play the tournament before you pay, this isn't a big deal: in fact, it's a norm for payment to take a little while. However, make sure you can try and deliver it a week or two after the event if possible.
Part 5: Raising Money Outside of School Support
In college, I was privileged enough to have the University provide some amount of support financially to quiz bowl. However, there are hundreds of schools that don't do this, or may have methods that complicate this process. Thus, students may have to rely on their own to raise money to play events. This gets expensive really fast - especially for Nationals trips. I will leave this thread open for more discussion, but in high school, I had to raise money to pay for our first trip to HSNCT. Here's some things that we did.
- The classic: run a trivia night. Put in a pay-in and be sure to create some prizes for teams. I recommend writing the questions to have a personal flavor for your school. Blending pop culture and quiz bowl content in a 50/50 combo is what we did.
- Use a fundraising website. You'd be surprised how much people around you want to see you succeed and would chip in some money to do so. While its unsustainable to do this in the long run, fundraising for a big Nationals trip is reasonable. Ask family, quiz bowl mentors, community members, business sponsors (!) - the horizons are open here.
- Host tournaments! As mentioned before, this is a good way to pay for events. In Iowa's experience, hosting one event could pay for us to bring about 2-3 teams to another event. May be a bit exhausting if this is the only fundraising method you use, but is a good way to be involved in the community.
- Writing a set as a club is always an option, but is a little wonky since it may be more worthwhile just to have the money go to the writers of a club set, who then use it to pay for attendance.
Finances can be difficult, but there's a lot of people out there who can help. I hope this guide gave a good starting place for where to think about finances. I'd be happy to edit this post to embellish points, add missing points, and further discuss this matter.