ECS Joint Council Expense Report

The Instructionally Related Activities (IRA) grant is effectively giving your club free money for supplies (not food), competitions, conferences, and travel. In order to request the funds on your behalf, we need information about your club activities. We will use your past, current, and future funding needs along with highlights of your various activities to explain how critical it is that ASI continues to award this grant to us so that you can succeed in your academic career.

When we apply for the grant, we explain what you have accomplished in the past as well as what you plan to do in the future.

Please enter a form for each event. However, if it's a monthly recurring event like general meetings you can lump them all together in one submission; no need to report each one of those kinds of events individually.

Current Fiscal Year Events

The current fiscal year is July 1, 2023 – June 30, 2024.

Expense/fund reporting deadline: March 8, 2024.

Please report events for the current fiscal year as well as events that you know about that may occur in the next fiscal year if possible. Because the grant deadline for the next fiscal year is the end of March of the current fiscal year, it's expected that you will be making estimates for expenses and funds for those events that haven't occurred yet (i.e. after today and before July 1, 2024)

Also please try to estimate expenses for events that will occur in the next fiscal year (July 1, 2024 - Jun 30, 2025).

Future Events?

Many events happen every year at similar dates, but venues change. If you know where next fiscal year's event/competition will be, and expect expenses to be higher because of the location, lodging, travel, etc. it's important that you try to estimate those increased expenses. This will allow us to extrapolate based on current events as well as account for increased expenses to request additional funds.

Estimating future upcoming event expenses is especially crucial after all the canceled events due to the pandemic that are now starting up again.

What do we need from you?

For each event, please use this Club Event Report form.

The form above has the following fields, for reference:

Club

• Contact Name and email (someone to contact for addition information)
• Event Title
• Event Date
• Event Description & Highlight (What was the event? If it was a competition, did you win an award?)
• Number of Attendees (How many students participated?)

Expenses (Event Costs)

• Supplies
• Registration
• Travel/Lodging
• Mileage
• Total Expense (This can include expenses not listed above, such as food, room reservations, etc.)

Fund Sources (How Were The Costs Covered?)

• ASI DOC Funding
• IRA
• SAD
• UEI
• Fundraising (company donations, sweatshirt sales, etc)
• Out of pocket

If you report an event where funds do not match expenses, the lower amount will be taken and any potential IRA funds will be lost. There should be no fund source that is missing from the form, since "fundraising" and "out-of-pocket" are options. It is critical that expenses and funds balance.

For example, if event A was reported as costing $100 in supplies and the funding, from all sources, was reported as $0 we must mark that event's expenses as $0. If there are fund sources that you feel do not fit into any of the above categories, please put that info in the comments for the event.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: We have a competition in the spring, but we buy supplies for each meeting as we prepare for the competition. Do we need to complete a form for each meeting?

A: No. Use a single form for the event and include the supplies used during the meetings as you prepare for the event. The same kind of monthly recurring events can be lumped into only one form submission, please just make use of the comments section in the form.

Q: We are not sure of the final cost for an upcoming event. What do we put for the expenses?

A: Provide an educated guess. For example, if your club has good records, you can use them to estimate (pre-pandemic) event expenses. Any ballpark estimate is better than not submitting an event if you're worried about not having exact figures.

Q: For future events: If we haven't had to cover any expenses yet how do we know what fund sources to use?

A: Typically, the best way to estimate how to fund an event is to aim for 33% IRA, 33% ASI DOC, and 33% fundraising. The goal is to have 0% out of pocket.

Q: We haven't done our normal events for two years because of the pandemic, will we have enough funds from previous grants to support these upcoming events?

If you don't have any past events to report, please report any upcoming or future events with any expense and funding estimates. Additionally, please also report if you know a venue change will result in increased expenses for next year's event. The events you report here are for next fiscal year's funds.

We already have this fiscal year's grant funds but there is still time to request funds for future events (remember the current fiscal year ends June 30 of this year). Any information on event expenses and potential funding needs can be crucial to help us request enough funds to cover any increased costs.