Accountancy/Bookkeeping

Basic Bookkeeping

An introduction to bookkeeping for community non-profit organizations.

Quick Start

The purpose of this section is to introduce core concept: "always leave a papertrail", and give easy tips for a person who is immediately assuming financial duties, but hasn't yet read the rest of this document. Mention multi-signature bank accounts and other good habits?

So you've volunteered to be a treasurer for a community organization. Good for you! Now what? It can take time to take over from your predecessor and/or setup accounting practises for a new organization. In the mean time, your organization still needs to move forward. But here are some simple guidelines that will immediately help:

get for receipts for everything. Write on the receipts memos of what it was for and who paid it (and if they need to be reimbursed)
avoid cash, prefer cheques.
if you have to accept cash, have two people count the money and sign a statement to the effect: "On this day, at this event, we counted $money in the cashbox. There was $float at the start of the event, so we collected $net total. (Person) is going to deposit $deposit in our bank account."

When in doubt, ask yourself: "if someone else looked at my records, would they understand how the money was spent?"

Paper Trails

The purpose of this section is to introduce a simple single-entry accounting system, building on the previous section. Do this by showing ready-to-use examples of photocopiable forms, or showing how to use spreadsheets or chequebooks to track (and annotate) bank accounts. If possible, try and sneak in terminology and techniques from double-entry accounting.

Cheque Book

(Using a cheque book to track and annotate bank account activities.)

Event Cash Flow Sheets

(one 8.5x11 sheet of paper to record cash collection—e.g. from ticket sales. Have a chart to help cash counting, then a form for folk to sign off on the results. Organization-specific stuff would also be handy: e.g. new members.)

Next Steps

The purpose of this section is to introduce double-entry accounting, building on the previous section. Show how to do this using low-tech supplies (eg. a dollar-store notebook). Lots of examples. Suggest spreadsheets.

(ideas: introduce "cash flow sheets" to replace the signed statements described above. Talk about banking. How to record transactions. Generally how to set up a simple bookkeeping system.. possibly including low-tech examples.)