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

[Michael Hendry]

> On 25 Aug 2019, at 15:55, Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Cash.

> The business features of gnucash only work for accrual.

In that case, my question in the subject line is answered, in the negative! 

> 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.

Volunteering to be a paying guest at a “Foundation Dinner” is the only undertaking that fits into the definition of a pledge, but I can see that setting up an invoice for it would make it “receivable”, and have a lifetime that went beyond the financial year’s end.

But if I avoided setting up invoices for this particular fundraising activity, could I use the Business Features to record income from a each member (“Customer”) as it arises?

> 
> 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.

That’s a method I hadn’t thought of, and will look into. There’s the obvious risk of these two sets of books getting out of step.

> 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 >>

From the point of view of the annual report to OSCR (the charity regulator) there is no need for detailed reporting of income - see https://www.oscr.org.uk/media/1800/2015-01-27-example-accounts-scio.pdf - but the annual claim for Gift Aid requires the total contributed per annum by each individual member. The 25% boost that Gift Aid covers is the reason why most Rotary Clubs in the UK set up charities which operate “at arms-length” from the clubs themselves but whose trustees are club officers. 

> 
> 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.
> 

The way I’ve set up the accounts may need review, as I’m going to require a lot of individual searches to isolate contributions from individual members.

I think I need to remove a tier and identify the intended destination of the income using a tag in a searchable field.

Income:Destination1:MemberA … MemberN
Income:Destination2:MemberA … MemberN
…
Income:DestinationX:MemberA … MemberN

 - a total of X * N accounts.


Becomes

Income:Donations:MemberA … MemberN, with Destinations 1…X recorded in the Description field of each transaction.

 - a total of N accounts.

Thanks for your continued interest and support,

Michael