SOAR finance system

SOAR, the Student Organization for Aerospace Research at the University of Calgary, builds rockets on sponsorship money. As VP Finance I inherited the ledger: a spreadsheet that had grown columns the way old houses grow extension cords. Reimbursements were entered line item by line item, one row per receipt line, by whoever had the patience that day. Nothing announced a new entry, so claims sat unseen. The sheet was slow, the layout was hostile, and month end was archaeology.

Underneath the entry problem sat a reporting problem: sponsorship applications went out without grounded financial reporting behind them, because the ledger could not be trusted enough to report from.

No budget for software. A team of volunteer engineering students with zero patience for finance tools. Data that had to live where the club already lived, in shared cloud documents. And a treasurer seat that turns over every year, so whatever I built had to survive me leaving it behind.

The first version was a full Microsoft Access application: entry forms, a relational database, the works. It fixed data entry and proved the workflow, but it lived on one Windows machine and the club lives in the cloud. So I rebuilt the same workflow on Google Sheets with Apps Script: a form style UI that turns a stack of receipt lines into clean ledger rows in a single pass, on infrastructure every member already had open.

The Apps Script form is public ongithub.com/gsaure/SOAR.

Reimbursement entry went from a dreaded per line chore to a single pass, claims stopped disappearing into the sheet, and the next treasurer inherited a system instead of a haunted spreadsheet. With a ledger the club could trust, sponsorship applications could finally stand on real financial reporting.