Notes for the Secretary

"When I was young, I thought that money was the most important thing in life. Now that I am old, I know it is." -- Oscar Wilde

This page needs to be updated.

Scenario

You spent ages cultivating that meek and harmless demeanor. You worked for years in the banks of Zurich, watching and waiting with your hands upon the pulsing golden lifeblood of nations. You perfected the Orbital Mind Control Lasers not two days before the spring Guild meeting. Damn lot of trouble you went through to get this position, wasn’t it? How silly of you.

Work? I have to do what?

As Secretary, these are your main duties:

• Deal with applying for money from Finboard.
• Deal our financial accounts and spend our allocation.
• Reimburse GM teams.
• Levy dues on Guild members.
• Order and sell t-shirts, weapons, and whatever else you feel like.

Financial Accounts

You should get access to our financial data as soon as possible. Email funds@mit.edu, telling them that you are treasurer for the Assassins’ Guild and request account access. Note that you’ll need to do this at the start of every summer, since authorizations expire June 1, though if you just got elected at the April meeting, your authorization will likely last until June 1 of the following year. You can verify your access at rolesweb.mit.edu. It’s also a good idea to turn on Atlas email reporting: you can do this by going to this URL and checking off all the boxes.

You will need reporting bits on our accounts.

• 2720030 - Main Account
• 2720031 - Funding Account

You will also want REQUISITIONER bits (general not attached to an account) and spending bits (CAN SPEND OR COM- MIT FUNDS) on the main account. These will let you order from Ecats (i.e. Staples) without spending people’s money.

You also need to attend SAFO’s treasurer training once a year. There’s not much useful there that’s not covered in this document or that the outgoing treasurer probably hasn’t told you, but you need to go to meet Finboard requirements and so you can appeal Finboard allocations. Note that you skirt the requirement if the Grandmaster has attended a treasurer training, but this is not recommended.

Deposits can be made at the Student Activities Finance Office (W20-575). Petty cash should technically be deposited before spending. If you want to reimburse people using the petty cash instead of waiting for SAO, you could later have SAO reimburse you (personally) by submitting the receipts under your name, and then depositing cash into the main Account.

You can see how money we have left in each account and what we’ve spent money on by going to atlas.mit.edu, hovering over Reporting and choosing Cumulative Account Balance Report, Funding Account Balance Report, or Transaction Report.

Finboard

Finboard is a committee of ten people, from the UA, ASA, and other appointed and elected people, from whom the Guild and other ASA-recognized organizations get money. To this end, each funding period (currently January-March, April-June, July-September, and October-December), you must fill out a web form on the Finboard web page that will ask for information about the Guild and its income and expenditures. Attach a page of text (“budget defense”) explaining these expenses and the Guild in general. Read the instructions on Finboard’s web page for details. Feel free to copy and paste (modifying as needed) from old budget defenses, findable here.

If you’re unsatisfied with the budget, you can apply for appeals, repeating the process. You can’t appeal for new line items, just the ones on your original budget request that didn’t get full funding. Unless they’ve changed, you can’t have money taken away from you at appeals -- you only win or break even. You can find how much we’ve historically gotten under “Regular Allocations Archive” on the finboard website.

Reimbursements

After a game, the GMs will come up to you with a big pile of receipts. If they haven’t done this and it’s nearing the end of the funding cycle, make them.

Any reimbursements falling under the Events category technically must be advertised on events.mit.edu and be submitted with a poster advertising the event, stating that it was funded by the “UA Finance Board” and include the UA logo. Try to make sure GM teams make the poster ahead of time, and that the Grandmaster posts to events.mit.edu. In practice these rules haven’t been enforced, but be aware of them.

To reimburse someone, go to atlas.mit.edu, select “Reimbursement” under “Buying”, and fill it out. G/L Account puts the expense into one of Finboard’s funding categories; there are codes. Cost Object should be the account number. Other fields are reasonably named. Attach scans of all receipts you’re submitting, and copies of the poster and event listing if you’re using events funding. Also print out the RFP, all the receipts, the poster, and the event listing. Send the electronic copy to ’Student Activities Office’. Put the paper copy in the bin for RFPs in W20-575.

When describing expenditures, try to match your descriptions to line items in the budget request. Within a few weeks, the GM should have a check or direct deposit sent to them if you do all of this by the deadlines.

Keep an eye on the deadlines! Current information can be found at the finboard website. Extensions can be obtained, but you need to email funds@mit.edu well before the deadline.

Also, try to spend all the money before the deadlines. Finboard likes people who spend up their allocations. Buy stationery supplies for the office and guns/ammo for the armory. Look closely at the budget request and see how much money you’ve got left in each allocated category in the Finboard account before you start splurging, though. And make sure you have enough time to both shop and submit the receipts.

You can buy office supplies easily through Staples online. You’ll need to e-mail funds@mit.edu to request access to ECAT, but once you do, just go to ecat.mit.edu and order. The “Ship To” address for any stuff we order should be W20-549 since people generally aren’t in our office, and you can just pick it up from there once it’s delivered.

You can also just buy everything from Amazon. Amazon sells everything. It is recommended to put everything you want to buy into your cart, then go to the SAO office (W20-549) and ask to borrow Colin Codner’s (cmcodner@mit.edu) credit card. This removes the need to front the money for large purchases.

For reimbursements, keep in mind that SAO won’t reimburse tax, so be sure to use the tax exempt form if you want to be reimbursed for tax. Get the form here. You’ll want both “Sales Tax Exemption Form ST-2” and “Sales Tax Exemption Form ST-5”, though most places that don’t give you trouble with them won’t really look at them.

Dues

In the past, the SoE used the extort application in /mit/assassin/Members to keep track of dues. You can find out how to use this application using extort --help. The SoE also used to go to packet handouts and collected dues there. This has fallen out of practice and these days dues only get collected at meetings. Dues are also now optional donations with suggested amounts, are aren’t required to play games. So your job is to collect dues at meetings and keep track of who has paid (even if they’ve only “paid” $0).

Dues schedule:

• 1 year (Student): Suggested $0
• 1 year (non-Student): Suggested $10
• Life: $111
• Permanent: $666

There’s a page on the Guild wiki advertising dues; if you change the above, change that page as well: Join the Guild.

T-shirts

We order t-shirts (To Err is Human... and I’M NOT HERE) from QRST’s. They are located somewhere up in/around Union Square. Order early if you need them by a deadline. QRST’s is notorious for deadline slippages. You can find them at www.qrsts.com.

We currently have as t-shirts:

• $15 white and red (or green for High Council) on black, double-sided “To Err Is Human”
• $10 white on black “I’M NOT HERE”
• $10 grey on grey “I’M NOT HERE”

The image for the To Err is Human... shirt has been lost and recovered some number of times during the Guild’s history. The graphics for the most recent version, hopefully an accurate one, are stored at /mit/assassin/Shirts.

Selling Weapons

As of 2014, the Guild does not regularly sell weapons. However, if there ever is demand/supply, here is some outdated clue.

You’ve been in the Guild a while, so you know the drill: Patrol guns $2, disc guns $3. If you think you can change these prices and keep the same sales volume, go ahead -- sales of disc guns fell off after the first week or two when prices rose to $4, so be careful. Boxes of discs can be sold for $2.
You should be prepared to either sell or have someone else sell guns before every game at packet handout and during the first evening of the game. You can sell guns at other random times too (e.g., when a hall or ILG wants a bunch, in line for Bad Taste). You should be able to get away with charging an extra $1 per gun at Bad Taste.  Make sure you always have a good supply in stock before a game runs.  It generally takes a week for guns to arrive after you order them, but you can get three-day shipping for an additional charge.
On March 2008, the Secretary of the Exchequer bought a lot of 500+ Patrol guns from Imperial Toy (item 8304c). The darts are mostly compatible with the old dart guns, except for a little triangle notch that needs to be aligned when reloading. Mechanically apt people have figured out a way to convert those guns to use both kinds of darts, using a dremel to remove the notch. Imperial Toys would not take an order of less than $400, so you might have to do some planning ahead when ordering the next lot.  The guns come in big crates of 144 each, at a cost of $1.60 per unit, plus shipping.  Their sales representative in the area have the following contact info:

    Phone: (609) 689-1225
    Fax: (609) 689-1227
    Email: fmwsales@aol.com
    Address:
    Freud, Morris & Williams
    2032 Nottingham Way
    Hamilton, NJ 08619

As of 2011, the Guild has too many Patrol guns and not enough Patrol darts.  If you manage to acquire a large number of Patrol darts (by, perhaps, convincing Imperial to sell darts in bulk), everyone will love you.
**As of 2012, I was not able to contact Gordy Toys, it might still be possible to get disk guns, but you will have to be more creative (locate the old owner, figure out which company fabed them, order direct etc.**
Disc guns used to come from Ray-Line in Massachusetts, but since the Guild switched over to green-and-yellow left-loaders (item 522) you get them from Gordy Toys in New Jersey. This is because a) people think they’re really spiffy keen and b) they’re half the cost ($1 each). You can order by phone or by fax. However, they won’t deal with orders of less than $250, and they no longer sell boxes of extra ammo.

    Phone: (908) 755-9660
    Fax: (908) 755-9670
    Address:
    900 North Avenue
    P.O. Box 2769
    Plainfield, NJ 07062-5869

Ray-Line has begun selling boxes of discs for $0.45 a box; these do work in the Gordy guns but not amazingly well.  They either sell them loose or packed in 100’s. It’s cheaper to buy the former (shipping fees), but easier to re-sell the latter. Discs are item number 316. They’ll take a credit card order over the phone, or slower, but more conveniently, you can just have SAFO send a check so you don’t have to personally pay for it up front.

    Phone: (978) 297-0088
    Address:
    Ray Plastic Inc
    155 Mill Circle
    Winchendon Springs, MA 01477

Addendum: Food for Meetings

As of now, the Secretary of the Exchequer should also order food for Guild meetings. This can be funded by Finboard, so remember to add around $200 in the budget per semester for this. This can be pizza unless Kendra Beckler needs to be in the room (in which case Chinese food works). Tell them to deliver to Lobby 7, and give them your phone number; when they call, come (with minions) and get the food. Food usually takes about an hour to exist, so order early.