Working with membership accounts

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 3/4/2015 10:52 AM, Raymond Laverty wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I’m new to Gnucash and would therefore appreciate any tips you may regarding the following:
>
> I work for a small organisation that has about 100 members from around the globe. Since we are planning to increase our membership dramatically over the next few years, I decided it might be good to start using an accounting software. Our budget is small, we have only one bank account and a paypal account, and our income is from membership fees and project funding.
>
> My question is therefore, what is the best/easiest way in Gnucash to keep track of my members’ payments? Should I enter each one as a customer, and enter an invoice for each, or should I just create an account for each member or …??

You didn't indicate the nature of the organization and whether these 
payments to it (by the members) were legal obligations or not. However 
"easiest" is also a factor, so you might want to use the business 
features to invoice members even if not legal obligations (so not really 
receivables upon invoicing) and not have to keep a separate set of books 
for just that purpose. In other words, many organizations I know of 
"cheat" on this whether using gnucash or something else. Even if books 
kept "accrual" from the point of view of the program the treasurer can 
report on the cash basis by entering some temporary adjustments.

a) By your organizational bylaws, how are your books to be kept? (cash 
or accrual)
b) Are members' payments obligations? << note that your organization 
might have some control over this; again a bylaws matter >>.

Michael D Novack   (who is treasurer of some 501(c)3's and member of others)