Scout Troop Dues Structure

Thomas Levine _ at thomaslevine.com
Mon Apr 4 18:17:36 EDT 2016


Hi,

I do the accounting for a small unincorporated server association.
I have been debating whether to bring this up because it doesn't quite
match your approach of invoicing, but you might find it interesting.

We have twelve members, and we don't have a special bank account.
Our account structure looks like this

    Assets
      rmo
      tlevine
      ...
    Expenses
      Datacenter
      SSL certificate
      Hardware
    MembershipDues

Every quarter I post membership dues transactions where money leaves the
MembershipDues account and enters the member accounts under Assets, such
as Assets:tlevine. Members optionally pay me, in which case money moves
from other member accounts, like Assets:rmo, to Assets:tlevine.

The money in Assets represents the money held by members that belongs to
the group. As an alternative to paying me every quarter, members can
just do nothing, and the amount in their accounts will increase.

When we need the money, we call on members to purchase things or to send
money to other members. The most frequent sort of transaction is payment
of the monthly data center bill. We have a substantial surplus most
quarters, but we save for upgrades and emergencies.

Sending money is surprisingly difficult for certain members. Some of
our members are in Europe, and others are in North America, and sending
bank transfers can be hard in many North American banks. This system
supports dues payments through intermediate members and in exotic
currencies; someone once paid in Chaos Communication Congress tickets.

Instead of making invoices for member dues, I just send out balance
sheets and transaction logs.

Tom


More information about the gnucash-user mailing list