💳Purchasing

P-Card

• The Luddy debit card!

• With great power comes great responsibility

  • Karen hates it when people she doesn’t know comes to get the p-card

  • This is another reason why I said to become friends with her

• Remember, we are tax-exempt; it is such a nightmare to undo it when people pay taxes using the P-card

  • Sometimes you have to harass people into taking the tax-exempt code, but it is necessary that you do this Requesting the Card

• Luddy is changed up how to get the p-card this year

  • This system sucks and is inefficient, so I don’t know if they’ll keep it next year, but I’ll document it for you all the same

    • Start by filling out the excel sheet which can be found in Teams → Finance → Files → Purchase Requests → “Bill of Materials Template”

      • I suggest just duplicating this file every time you want to use it

  • Fill out whatever information it wants (I have plenty of examples in this same folder for you to reference)

  • Fill out the qualtrics form that is linked to the original, blank, template file

  • You’re done! If you don’t hear back from Karen in 1.5 weeks, then you can email to follow up with her. However, we were told to wait that long first.

• I’m sure you can see how this is not efficient or speedy, so like all other things TED-finance related, plan ahead!

  • Note: In the past, you would just email Karen when you wanted it and she’d tell you whether or not you could have it

  • This approach still works, but only reserve it for emergency type things because this is not preferred

Amazon Purchases

• It’s natural to think that you can purchase things from Amazon using the p-card

• This is partially true and partially not true

  • If you need to buy something from Amazon, I suggest putting together a large list and making the purchase all at once

  • Follow the steps to request the p-card as you normally would (excel spreadsheet + form), but provide the link to every project in the spreadsheet

  • Then when you go to submit the form, in the comments section AND “when you’ll come to get the p-card" section, state something like “Please order these items from Amazon”

• Like any other time you request the p-card, submit all this information well in advance Informal (but good) Rules

• In my personal opinion, the only person who should ever pick up the p-card are you (Director of Finance), Director of Operations, and President

  • That's what we did this year and it worked brilliantly

  • Inevitably the Director of Operations will spend a lot of time with Karen, so it’s important Karen knows them as well

  • Purva was Director of Operations 2 years ago so she should already have a good relationship with Karen, and Amanda, Reece, and Karen already knew each other from other Luddy stuff

• Do NOT ever hand the p-card to anybody that is not Exec or the operations team

  • It is IMPERATIVE, that receipts are kept, and the money is handled well

  • The 1, singular time, I let someone not the people mentioned above have the card, they did not save the receipt (even though I explicitly said it multiple times and wrote it on instructions for them) and I got in trouble for it