The Undergraduate Student Government has reworked its allocation system for the third time in the past three years. This year’s system is called Campusvine and is intended  to simplify the process for clubs to get money.
Campusvine will be officially introduced this Saturday, Sept. 15, during USG’s Leadership Conference.
In order to receive event funding, clubs have had to submit their requests through ALLOCATE, which is usually lengthy or frustrating, according to club leaders. The revised system is intended to simplify the process in which clubs receive funding, according to USG officials.
Some clubs have already tried using the system. Cassandra DeFelice, president of the SBU Ballroom Dance Team club, said that her organization had not had any big problems using Campusvine.
“We were able to figure it out pretty easily,” DeFelice said. “We just missed this one part about signatures.” She said, however, that the new system “can be a little too detailed.”
Campusvine requires clubs to be a little more aware of their own budgets and, when calculating the amount necessary for a club’s event, can sometimes ask for the specific price per unit of the individual items club members have in mind.
USG Treasurer Allen Abraham said that this should not be a problem, though, since clubs will be able to choose from a pre-approved list of vendors. Clubs will also be able to manually enter a vendor’s information if the vendor is not part of the list. Clubs can estimate general prices for products and will be reimbursed for unspent money.
“We take all receipts back,” Abraham said about making sure clubs are using money on what they request it for. “They have to give it back to us within the week of purchase.”
Campusvine is a third-party system hosted by Heuretix, a company run by SBU and USG alumni Alexander Dimitriyadi, Moiz Khan Malik, David Mazza and Roman Belopolsky. The four alumni created USG’s first online allocation system, ALLOCATE, and voted at the end of their terms to switch the system again to Campusvine, which carries a $5,000 price tag.
Originally, money was allotted via a ‘paper system’ in which USG paper vouchers were manually processed by USG staff. Abraham said that clubs generally had to wait up to three weeks to receive requested funds. As a result, ALLOCATE was introduced last year in an effort to streamline the system.
According to Amanda Cohen, vice president of clubs and organizations at USG, ALLOCATE had several flaws, including a disconnect between actual budgets and budgets as they were represented online, as well as a faulty communications system that would sometimes fail to alert clubs that their request had been held pending paperwork.
This year, Campusvine was put into effect in a change Cohen said could be likened to the difference between the social media websites Myspace and Facebook—or an ALLOCATE 2.0.
Abraham said that there are a lot of factors that determine how quickly a club will get its funds, most of which have nothing to do with the USG—such as club officers’ signing off on vouchers and clubs’ obtaining food permits from Enviromental Health and Safety, an SBU agency—but that in all the process has been shortened to a week at longest, with the Campus Vine approval system only taking a day.