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

Greg Feneis mfeneis at gmail.com
Mon Aug 26 06:49:22 EDT 2019


Michael, I use GnuCash for my cash business and don't have any trouble with
it.  I think the only trouble you may have is with report generation.

Kind regards, Greg Feneis
(Pixel 3)


On Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 01:46 Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe:
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see
> https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information.
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>


More information about the gnucash-user mailing list