Working with membership accounts

Buddha Buck blaisepascal at gmail.com
Wed Mar 4 11:25:06 EST 2015


On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 10:53 AM Raymond Laverty <raymond.laverty at lylt.net>
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 can, and maybe you should, but it's a pain. There are also things you
should talk over with your local licensed accounting professional about how
you do it.

Adding hundreds of customers, and periodically issuing invoices to hundreds
of customers, is a pain.  If you are billing membership dues monthly,
that's hundreds of invoices a month. If you are billing annually, it's more
manageable, but still may be too much work. If you are billing annually,
but staggered over the year (so 10 a month or so) there's a lot of stuff to
keep track of that GnuCash won't do for you. The best way to do it in bulk
is to use some external tool (like a spreadsheet) to track your members and
find some way to export the data to a CSV file that can be imported as new
customers/members and as invoices.

If your local rules for how your type of organization does accounting
allows, it may be easier to track memberships using an outside source, even
a simple sheet of graph paper with one column for member name and columns
for payments, and simply tick off a payment when it's been made. Within
GnuCash, simply record a payment against Income:Memberships and
Assets:Checking (or Assets:PayPal), and don't worry about tying it in
PayPal to a specific member except by the description or memo field.

If your local rules require you to recognize income when the dues are due,
not when the payment arrives, you could still keep the members out of the
books by using an Assets:Outstanding Dues account, and scheduling
transactions between it and Income:Dues for each member (or batch of
members with the same due date), and then treat payments as being between
Assets:Checking and Assets:Outstanding Dues. It works the same as using an
A/R account, but without the invoices, or the need to account for each
member separately.

Exactly how you do it is dependent on your local rules, which we can't help
you with.


> Thanks for your assistance,
>
> Ray
>
>
>
> "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it
> is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. <
> http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/arthurscho103608.html>"
> (Arthur Schopenhauer <http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/
> arthurscho103608.html>)
>
> www.disclosureproject.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.


More information about the gnucash-user mailing list