by Fred Johnson » Mon Jun 20, 2011 1:11 pm
Ya know... I was thinking we needed something more ... double entry accounting, GAAP and such. Probably the result of too many college operations mgmt and business courses 20+ years ago. (Loved my college accounting course. Must be the engineer in me.)
- I tried to get started with TroopLedger. Worked for a day or two with it. It's quirky, dated and was just a little too difficult to use.
- I tried QuickBooks. I'm not a professional accountant and realized it needs more expertise and commitment than I had. Chart of accounts. Which accounts go up or down with credits/debits. Plus, I was concerned about handing it off to a non-accountant volunteer later.
- I had already started producing "event summaries" in Excel. Who, when, where, what, ROSES, THORNS, BUDs on a single page for review at the troop committee meetings.
- I had already started documenting in Excel each bank deposit in detail. check #/cash. Amount. Scout to credit. Name on check (if not scout family). Purpose of money. This was a big problem before as we did not document deposits. Previously data was entered directly into TroopLedger and then deposited. When the treasurer re-closed the previous year (after making a fix), it re-formatted and destroyed all our deposit data for nine months of the next calendar year. We had very little documented elsewhere to use for recovery. Also, I think some deposits were combined or other money was dropped into the deposit without being posted to TroopLedger. Argh.
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So the FINAL RESULT is
- Made slight changes to the "event summary".
--- Listed and summed the scouts and adults attending.
--- Listed and summed how much was charged each scout adult
--- Listed and summed event expenses
--- Calculated a profit / loss on each event
--- Calculated a cost per person for the event
--- (might add) a calculated cost of food per person for the events
- Every deposit is documented in Excel.
--- check #/cash. Amount. Scout to credit. Name on check (if not scout family). Purpose of money.
--- I use the same format for every deposit so that I can easily cut/paste them together. That allows me to sort accross deposits.
- Use QUICKEN (not QuickBooks) to report by merging #1 event summaries (How much to charge each scout) and #2 deposit records.
--- each scout is an "account"
--- each event is a "cagetory"
--- I can report with subtotal by category to see if charges match event summaries and if credits match the deposit record.
--- I can report with subtotal by scout to handout scout account balances and history.
--- Depending on the adult, I sometimes bill/credit the adult under the scouts name. Sometimes I create a separate adult account for them. It depends on the family, the scout and the parent leadership involvement (taxes, seeing them weekly).
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It's not perfect, but it's easy. The part I like the best is that it divides and conquers. Instead of requiring the whole accouting process to be perfected, progress is made by completing individual event summaries and deposit records. The scout account reports are just re-typed summaries of the official data.
Personally, even if I adopted QuickBooks or TroopLedger, I'd still want to document every event/deposit in an Excel file. Depending on only clean usage of QuickBooks and/or TroopLedger is how we got into our current mess. It left us with no way to re-create our financial records.
