[GNC] Bookkeeping for a club's charity account - use business features?

[Michael Hendry]

As previously mentioned on the list, I’ve just become Treasurer of our local Rotary Club, which has two sets of books, one relating to the business of running the club (annual subs, insurance, secretarial support, etc) and the other to the club’s charitable activities.

The club part is straightforward, and has no need for the business features.

The charity accounts are different in that although the bulk of the income comes from the general public, some of it is extracted from members with particular charitable destinations in mind.

For example, the price of the meals at meetings is rounded up to the nearest pound, and the remainder is earmarked for “Charity Choice”. Not all members attend every meeting, and some members skip the meal and make a token payment to Charity Choice. There are several such income headings to deal with.

The difficulty is that it must be possible to document each individual member’s contributions over the year in order to make a Gift Aid claim to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), which tops up the members’ contributions by 25%.

I have set up a series of accounts of the form:

Income:Destination1:member1 … Income:Destination1:memberN

…

Income:DestinationX:member1 … Income:DestinationX:memberN

which allows me to report on the total income for each destination easily, but makes it harder to pick out individual members’ contributions.

Changing the hierarchy to Income:memberN:DestinationnX would make it easy to pick out the Gift Aid detail per member, but harder to report on the total raised for each destination.

It occurs to me that it might be easier to treat members as customers, who would “purchase” Gift-Aid-Claimable (as well as non-claimable) items. In the case of “Foundation Dinners”, members commit in advance to pay for a meal at another member’s home - this commitment would be equivalent to an order payable on delivery of the goods. I wouldn’t anticipate issuing invoices, but a monthly list of defaulters would allow me to issue gentle reminders.

It might well be easier to deal with some of these reporting tasks using spreadsheets, but I’d much prefer to have a single point of entry for each transaction.

It’s been the usual practice for Treasurers to serve for five years, so slow-but-sure is preferable to fast-and-dirty.

I’d appreciate the advice of the list - especially from anyone with practical experience of my situation.

Regards,

Michael