[GNC] Club membership fees and charitable contributions - Business Features or Assets?

[Adrien Monteleone]

I’m not sure about keeping track of member donations in an Asset account.

Sure, the donation is an asset of the club. That would go to Cash or Checking, etc.

But the other side of that should be some sort of Income account I would think.

With the Business Features you could set up each member as a ‘customer’ and use the Customer Report to tally their period/annual donations.

This would also allow you to easily track the annual subscriptions if you ‘invoice’ them. (you don’t need to send actual invoice, just create and post them)

You can easily duplicate invoices to reduce typing. You can also do some quick duplication in a spreadsheet, then import this data as ‘invoices’ into GnuCash, reducing even more work.

From a manual perspective, you’d have to create either another level of tracking, perhaps using manual AR entries against donation income.

Work reduction could be accomplished with scheduled transactions, though you’d still need one for each member. There is also the ‘duplicate transaction’ function that might come in handy.

As for reporting with manual transactions, you could utilize the Transaction Report and its filters to tailor the report to your needs.

Finally, on the spreadsheet end, you could reduce data entry duplication and opportunity for errors using sheet/cell references to a master sheet/workbook. The master would get updated either upon opening or manually using an ‘update links’ function. (exists in Libreoffice Calc, I’m sure Excel has something similar)

There are some people using GnuCash for non-profits on this list, hopefully they’ll see this and chime in with tips and pitfalls to watch out for.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Aug 2, 2019, at 1:50 AM, Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I have just become Treasurer for my Rotary Club, and my predecessor used spreadsheets to record the club’s finances.
> 
> Everyone is required to pay an annual subscription, but there are a number of ways in which members may opt in to regular or occasional charitable payments (e.g. an annual subscription to a monthly Bottle Draw or “Foundation Meals”, where a member hosts a dinner party and the club receives donations from the guests, destined for the Rotary Foundation charity).
> 
> We can reclaim tax at 25% of the value of the charitable donations in the form of Gift Aid, but it is necessary to keep track of who paid what in order to make the necessary annual claim. Separate spreadsheets are currently used to keep track of these payments, but they’re not linked to the other spreadsheets - with the attendant risks of missed or duplicate entries.
> 
> I think that the Business Features of GC are probably overkill, and am looking at having an Assets:Members:member_name account for each member, primed with (e.g.) the Annual Subscription at the beginning of the Rotary year, and with optional entries at the time of opt-in to the charitable donations.
> 
> I’d appreciate the thoughts of the group, especially from anyone who’s tried either (or both) the Business Features and the Assets approach.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Michael