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

Adrien Monteleone adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net
Mon Aug 26 23:21:08 EDT 2019


To make your life even easier, consider creating another Google Sheet that pulls info from the shared one, does the summary math you want, and results in an arrangement that can be imported directly into GnuCash. Then you don’t have to type anything twice and eliminate occasions for math mistakes.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Aug 26, 2019 w35d238, at 9:36 PM, doncram <doncram at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In your case, Michael Hendry, are there other persons who need or work with some of the information?  Surely then there are communication / information sharing needs, which cannot be addressed easily with your single-access semi-complicated GnuCash system.   
>  
> I, too, am new treasurer of a nonprofit, a botanical garden society which is set up as a charitable nonprofit, and I have puzzled over similar issues for tracking, but also for sharing info.  A big issue is that select other board members or volunteers work with some of the same information.  The treasurer job is too big already, and others are better about handling some tasks like tracking membership renewals (i.e. contributions at "pledge" amount) and sending out reminders, and following up with thank you notes in writing for larger donations, and email notes for smaller ones.  One volunteer, call her the membership director,  has a big spreadsheet of most of the members/contributors and dollar amounts and so on.  The board secretary is really good at writing nice thank you notes for the bigger donations. I hate the fact that I, as treasurer, if I follow the past practice, am essentially duplicating a whole lot of info, when I enter each donation or membership payment, putting member name into a description/note field.  "We" already have that information!  Couldn't it be shared?  And what about cross-checking the spreadsheet information vs. my accounting entries.... I know there are at least a few discrepancies, which need to be identified and followed up upon, else a donor gets no acknowledgment or gets "billed" twice or whatever.
> 
> So, I have started use of a combined-access spreadsheet, by uploading the membership director's spreadsheet to a Google Docs spreadsheet, and I talked her through using it online.  Happily it is perfectly easy for her to do her job in the now-shared spreadsheet.  And I will add columns as necessary to record deposit dates and whatnot.  I am hoping to do my data entry about specific individuals there, i.e. by just recording treasurer stuff in "my" columns, adding to already-existing rows for all members.  I am hoping to stop my very detailed accounting, and making occasional accounting entries that are summary, tying out to the info in my columns.  E.g. I can record the donation/membership check amounts in a column for income from August 2019, say, and make just one summary entry into the accounting system.
> 
> I cannot imagine myself producing all the necessary reports to serve others and all purposes if I was handling all the info myself.  And I can't imagine collaborating with others in any way other than a shared spreadsheet.  Any comments/suggestions?
> 
> Thank you Michael Hendry for the question and thank all the participants so far!
> 
> sincerely, Donald Cram
> 



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