Treasurer accounts help needed

sammyw

I have just taken over as treasurer for a school PTA. It's a registered charity and I have been asked to provide accounts for them to see at the next meeting. The previous treasurer did not have accounts - she just checked off the cheques against the statement each month. I was given some receipts and some statements but not all of them. I'm going to go into bank and ask for copies so I can see the whole of last year at least.
So it appears that I'll not be able to complete receipts etc for last year (up to when I took over in Sept) but how do I start now? I have a rough idea of spreadsheet column headings but if someone else is an accountant or has knowledge of what I should do please can you tell me.
We have at least 2 main events each year and a few smaller ones inbetween.
Hope someone can help!

djtonyb

Hi Sammy

I run a Brownie Pack and keep my accounts in Excel. I don't believe your accounts have to be state of the art - just detailing in/outs and balancing.

I can email you a copy of how my accounts are laid out if you wish - PM me.

djtonyb

Savvy_Sue

I agree with djtonyb, they don't have to be rocket science. Think about what you want to get out of them at the end of the year: in my PTA days it was

• How much we spent
• What we spent it on
• How much we raised
• What we did to raise it

So that you get an idea of whether another quiz night makes enough money to be worth the effort of organising it etc.

The disadvantage of what your previous treasurer was doing is that it doesn't tell you about things which haven't yet gone through the bank's books yet. So, if you've written the school a cheque for £1000 but they don't clear it for a month, you need to know that you've got £1000 less than the bank thinks you've got. Yes, you do need to balance against the statements, to check that what you THINK you paid in is what the bank thinks it received, but the 'forecast' is just as important.

I can also email you how I had my accounts set up for an out of school club if you PM me your email address. There will be more categories of expenditure than you'd need, but it will show you a way to do it.

Another thing I did was analyse the takings from each stall after a major event like a Christmas Fair (if I could keep the money pots separate before counting!) That way I could show that hiring a bouncy castle didn't make us a huge amount of money, but it was thought worth it because it was an 'attraction', something that would draw people in. On the other hand, the raffle and tombola made massive amounts, for minimal expenditure ...

Good luck! BTW, are you able to ask the previous treasurer for the missing statements? The bank will probably charge for copies! An alternative would be if you can register for online banking, you might then be able to download them for free.

Werdnal

You don't even need to do it in Excel, as Word will add or subtract a column of figures for you if you lay them out as a table.

You basically need one column for "Receipts" or "Income" (ie money received) and a second one for "Payments" or you may call it "Outgoings" (ie money spent). Add a column next to each for your cash figures and you are away!

This will give you a total in and out per month.

You will obviously have to check the bank statements to ensure all cheques paid out have been cashed, to allow for any fluctuations in the balance showing so you don't get any unwanted surprises!

As you are a registered charity, you will also need to submit year end account to the Charity Commission.

sammyw

Thanks everyone

i_am_really_rich!!

If you need any info I am a school bursar and pta treasurer and I audit accounts for another school, PM me and I can email you anything you need.

Savvy_Sue

Werdnal wrote:

You don't even need to do it in Excel, as Word will add or subtract a column of figures for you if you lay them out as a table.

Yes, but if you then realise one of the figures is wrong, and you change it, I don't think the total changes, whereas with Excel it does!

Plus you can add across rows in Excel, which has its uses.

Truly, you'll never regret the small amount of extra hassle of learning to use Excel!

Debt_Free_Chick

sammyw wrote:

I have just taken over as treasurer for a school PTA. It's a registered charity and I have been asked to provide accounts for them to see at the next meeting.

First off, you need to check what the Charities Commission requires you to do. If the PTA is not a company and has gross income of less than £100,000 pa then you can simply produce the accounts on a receipts & payments basis. With this method, the accounts only include everything received and everything paid out during the year.

Do they actually want the formal accounts at the next meeting? When is the charity's year-end? You would normally only prepare accounts at the end of the year - but for each meeting I would supply a bank reconciliation, to show that all the money paid & received has been properly accounted for.

If you are a small charity, you only need a simple "cash book" which you can run in Excel (or Word, but Excel has a slight advantage here). You then use the cashbook to provide a bank reconciliation each month and to prepare the end of year accounts.

In the cash book, you record every payment made and every one received - update the cashbook as each transaction occurs and don't leave it until the end of the month. Use one worksheet for receipts (money in) and another for payments (money out).

You probably also want to "analyse" each amount - certainly payments. This means that you have a brief description of what each payment represents and you group similar payments together. To do this, you need a column for each group - your columns might be something like "property maintenance", "insurance", "office supplies" etc. The columns should reflect the type of expenditure you have and what you need to show in the accounts. You might want to have columns that reflect the final format of the accounts, as required by the Charity Commission. (Some guidance about this here).

At the end of the year, the accounts are drawn up from the cash book and the total in each column shows where the money has been spent. Do you need to have the accounts audited?

Before then, you ought to do a bank reconciliation, each month. This balances the cash book to the bank statement. Firstly, update the bank statement. Take the balance shown on the latest statement then deduct any cheques written but not cleared and add in any amounts received but not banked. A simple way to do this is to "tick off" the entries shown on the statement in the cashbook. Unticked amounts then need to added (if receipts) or deducted (if payments) to the balance shown on the statement, to get the adjusted balance.

Then balance the adjusted balance to the cashbook. To do this, take the closing balance from the previous month, add all the receipts for the month and deduct all the payments for the month, from the cashbook. This amount should be exactly the same as the bank statement adjusted balance.

There's a helpful guidance note on bank reconciliations here.

Once you get the hang of the cashbook and the bank reconciliation, the accounts will take care of themselves. But I would urge you to be sure about what you are required to produce, under the Charity Commission rules.

HTH