[Noisebridge-discuss] accountability of money

[Patrick Keys]

Drinks
-------------------
A few comments have been to the effect of "buy drinks for everybody out 
of your own money."  That sounds good until you've done it a couple times.

Myself, and the others that have roughtly buy drinks for everybody, have 
noticed that the people buying drinks are routinely the *only* people 
buying drinks.  Many other people drink the drinks and seem to assume 
that obtaining more drinks is somebody else's problem.  It's not.  If 
you are already pay for your drinks in the form of a donation or buying 
more drinks, great.  Everyone else: please pay for your drinks.  throw 
in a buck or go buy more.

As for the tastebridge jar, there's a big glass jar on the kitchen 
counter that is *sorta* for tastebridge.  But its more than just 
tastebridge that drinks the drinks.  For what its worth, the tastebridge 
people are the only people that can actually account for money that I've 
seen.  They actually have a real ledger book with receipts taped in it 
for all their expenses.  Kudos to those people.

Petty Cash
--------------------------
There's some discussion about how money should be allocated or if we 
should just have a giant pool of donations and money gets spent on 
whatever it needs to be spent on, regardless of the jar it came from. In 
the business world, we call this "petty cash".  If you take some petty 
cash, for drinks/snacks/toiletries, then you leave a receipt and it's 
all good.  No reason we can't do that way at noisebridge.


Patrick





On 12/19/2010 8:20 PM, Josh Myer wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Patrick Keys <citizenkeys at gmail.com
> <mailto:citizenkeys at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     * The checks/balances of spending money kinda bothers me the most.
>     Sometimes the vibe feels like the default conclusion is to assume people
>     stole money, when in fact they used the money to buy drinks or snacks
>     for everybody.
>
>
> To the question of "Are people stealing from the jars?": I collated the
> donation jar data on the wiki a few weeks ago and looked at it; a
> reasonably short rolling average was pretty smooth, with peaks around
> the third Thursdays of the month (yay 5MoF!).  Anyone else interested in
> this should do the same collation work (I did this is as a throwaway
> exercise, and would actually like it if someone else cross-checked it).
>
> In any case, point being: if the buckets are being pilfered, it's being
> done either in a small way or very uniformly.  That was reassuring for
> me, at least.
> --
> Josh Myer 415.230.9791 <-- NOTE: New number!
> josh at joshisanerd.com <mailto:josh at joshisanerd.com>
>
> PS The specific sort of purchase you describe, of "drinks and snacks,"
> if it's happened, is a wholly inappropriate use for the money in the
> jars.  Tastebridge has its own little bucket for that, and let's skip
> the question of buying drinks to put into the fridge to be disbursed
> with suggested donations of $2.  That was a big can of worms.  (Toilet
> paper is another gimme, but: it would be Excellent if anyone buying TP
> would consider it a donation.)