Working with membership accounts

[Mike or Penny Novack]

> 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.

  AND, refer to your bylaws.
>
> 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.
And you CAN use gnucash for this. Gnucash can be used to keep more than 
one set of books, even a set of "books" that aren't really "books" in 
the normal sense (but can be used to produce invoices, keep track of 
which members have paid, produce reports on arrears, etc.
>
> 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.
The problem is usually the reverse. NORMALLY with voluntary membership 
associations there is no legal obligation to continue as a member or 
even notify intention to leave. The bylaws of the organization might 
require members leaving in arrears to rectify that in order to rejoin 
(or make it as if they never left) BUT that does not come into play 
until/unless the try to rejoin, and still, it's not a legal obligation.

In other words, the USUAL problem is that there are both "memberships" 
and "pledges"(those ARE legal obligations) to be accounted for AND the 
membership will usually want a unified statement. At least that's the 
situation in my jurisdictions and with the organizations with which I am 
involved.

Michael