Finance workspace
Orders, expenses, reimbursements, budgets, reports and tracking.
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- Is our team in standalone or fiscal sponsorship mode? Every team starts in standalone mode, where Robolyst tracks money you keep somewhere else. You switch to fiscal sponsorship mode only after your application is approved and the sponsorship agreement is countersigned; from then on the balance, card spending and reimbursement checks come from a real team finance account.
- How do I request a parts order, and who approves it? Open Finance > Orders, click Request parts, add your items and click Submit request. Anyone whose role has Approve & place orders can approve it, but not their own request if someone else on the team can.
- How do I log an expense or get reimbursed? Log spending under Finance > Expenses with Log expense. If you paid out of your own pocket, choose Personal (out of pocket) as the payment method; a budget manager then records you as paid back, or on a fiscally sponsored team you click Request to have a check mailed to you.
- How do budgets and seasons work? Each FTC season gets its own budget with its own categories, and every order, expense and income entry is filed against one season. Budget managers set an allocation per category on Finance > Budget, start the next season with leftover money rolled forward, and can close a finished season so nothing in it changes.
- What can the finance settings change? The Finance settings page sets the rules your team's orders, expenses and reimbursements are held to, plus currency, income tracking, spending alerts and closed seasons. Open it from Finance rules in the Settings section of the sidebar.
- Who places orders, and how does the order digest work? Anyone with Approve & place orders can mark an approved request as ordered. To make sure someone actually buys it, pick your order placers under Team Settings > Who places orders; they get one "ready to place" digest listing everything approved and waiting, about 15 minutes after the last approval by default.
- How does shipment tracking work, and why can't USPS or Amazon packages be tracked? A tracking number you type when marking an order as ordered is saved and shown on the order. Live status updates only come for UPS, FedEx and DHL numbers added from a shipping email in your team Inbox. USPS only gives tracking data to the business that printed the label, and Amazon's own delivery numbers aren't registered with any courier we can ask.
- How do finance reports and the money-flow chart work? Finance > Reports shows one season's spending broken down by category, month, vendor, subsystem and member, with a money-flow chart that draws where the season's money came from on the left and where it went on the right. You can download the spending as a CSV and the chart as a PNG.
- How does vendor autofill work on order requests? When you paste a product link into an order item, Robolyst names the vendor from the link's website and reads the product page to fill in the item name, price, part number and a thumbnail. It only fills fields you've left blank, so anything you typed stays.
- Who can see our receipts? A receipt opens only for signed-in members of your team whose role has View finances or Manage budgets, plus the person who uploaded it or filed the reimbursement claim it's attached to. Nobody outside your team can open one from a link, except Robolyst platform admins reviewing it.