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

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 8/25/2019 3:25 AM, Michael Hendry wrote:

First (and an important question)
     Is your organization om the cash or accrual basis? You should 
always state that. The business features of gnucash only work for 
accrual. And I see that your organization does pledges. Here in the US, 
pledges ARE receivable,but only according to the terms of the pledge << 
thus if a person pledged X a year for five years, only the X for the 
current year due NOW >> So pledge accounting will require extra work 
unless all your pledges are simple, immediate pledges.

But you can easily have a second set of books to keep and report on "by 
member" stuff, and if using the business features, can invoice. Note 
though that  at least in the US "membership dies" are not really 
receivables <<you are legally allowed to drop out of a voluntary 
organization at any time -- organizational rules about "demits", etc. 
apply only if you want to rejoin>> However many organizations even cash 
basis [prefer being able to send out "statements" (invoices to members)

Notice that I misunderstood.What I was suggesting was if you had to 
supply to the government the CORRECT member name for the donations, not 
just that it had to be SOME member's name. The latter is of course far 
simpler in terms of record keeping << I was picturing the former because 
possibly there were by person limits >>

Michael

PS: I do NOT attempt to get gnucash to produce reports in their final 
form. Easier to export full reports and then copy into a document that 
gets edited to remove extraneous detail, insert annotations, etc.


>> On 24 Aug 2019, at 23:03, Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> On 8/24/2019 5:39 PM, Michael Hendry wrote:
>>
>>> This is for the Gift Aid claim. We have to put in an annual claim to the taxman, identifying each contributor and his/her total amount donated during the year. Many UK charities use this method to boost their income - for example, when you pay the National Trust for Scotland the admission fee for one of their properties, they’ll ask you if you’re willing for them to make a Gift Aid claim and take down enough details to make that claim. You have to have enough income to be taxed at the basic rate, and the charity can claim tax back at a rate 25% of the admission fee.
>>>
>>> I have to account for the income as it is received, and I’d prefer to record sufficient detail in GC at that point, rather than run a parallel record on a spreadsheet or whatever.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Michael
>>>
>> OK, I think I understand now. And it seems straight forward to implement in gnucash, though you will an easy way to suppress the detail on most reports.
>>
>> When your organization has money come in for any purpose, that is a debit to cash (or some bank account) and a credit to some income account. Could be a split to multiple income accounts. Follow so far?
>>
>> So in your income tree, one item is "donations". Under that you have an account for each donor. A FULL "statement of revenues and expenses" << gnucash name Income Statement but I gave it the usual title a non-profit uses; a for profit says "profit and loss" >> shows the detail (total for each donor. But usually you would probably want to suppress that. You could try a dummy placeholder (say named "donors") in between donations and the individual donor accounts and try hiding that subtree when producing the report for the governing board who might want to know the total of all donations but not how much from each whom.
>>
>> Michael
>>
>> PS: So a typical transaction for an event where person A "rounds up" as a donation.
>>      debit
>>          cash   X
>>      credit
>>          dinner share   X - Y
>>           donor A          Y
>>
> It’s actually a little simpler than that, because a nominated cashier collects X from each member at the door but only has to pay X - Y to the venue after the meal, passing Y to the Charities Account.
>
> We have chosen to label this income “Charity Choice” - two members are selected at the end of the year to nominate their favourite charities to receive the proceeds.
>
> Thus I have:
>
> Income:Charity Choice:MemberA
> Income:Charity Choice:MemberB
> etc.
>
> Visiting members from other Rotary Clubs are charged in the same way, and (so far) I’ve recorded this income in the parent account (Income:Charity Choice), but there might be an argument for accumulating this income in a generic non-member child account (Income:Charity Choice:NonMember). We don’t claim Gift Aid on the latter.
>
> My difficulty is that we have several other buckets in which we accumulate income from members during the year, so I need:
>
> Income:Bucket1:MemberA … MemberN
> Income:Bucket2:MemberA … MemberN
> etc.
>
>  From time to time during the year I need to report on the total contents of each bucket, and once a year I have to report each individual member’s total contributions to all buckets. I think that using the Business Features might ease these two reporting requirements in that the Income buckets wouldn’t need all these child accounts and each member would have all bucket contributions recorded in his own customer record. This would also allow me to record commitments to contribute to any particular bucket at some point in the future and report on these via Accounts Receivable.
>
> Having no experience of the Business Features, I may not be seeing the elephant trap concealed in my path!
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael
>
>
>
>


-- 
There is no possibility of social justice on a dead planet except the equality of the grave.