Be a Treasurer for a Small Non Profit Club
A treasurer has some unique responsibilities because they must account for the club's assets and keep financial records. Treasurers must learn or have a basic knowledge in bookkeeping. They must have enough knowledge about the non-profit club's expenditures to manage and judge which transactions are the responsibility of the club and to judge if important receipts are in order or missing.
Steps
- Be responsible. Even if doing an unpaid job in a not-for-profit club, board members must act responsibly and follow any financial/accounting laws and regulations.
- Check where things are upon takeover. When you take over the Treasurer position from someone else (if the Club isn't newly started), you need to check assets and the book keeping so they tell same values. If not, point this out immediately. This ensures that you don't own the liabilities involved.
- Learn as much as you can. If you don't have enough knowledge about bookkeeping and/or the Club, then you better hurry getting that.
- Do regular checks of what activities are done. In particular, know what costs and receiving money is involved, so you can keep an eye on the Board. You must help them to ensure that they don't spend more than the Club can afford. Be aware of when you need to make transfers from bank account to cash.
- Study the laws/rules concerning how often bookkeeping needs to be done. These are different in different countries (when there are rules for for non-profit clubs). You need to do it anyway as often as you can. This will keep it structured enough for you to keep up after the "activity year" for the Club ends. Some "activity years" are same as calendar year, but some are different. It depends of what the Club paragraphs say.
- Hand over to the comptroller. Soon after the the "activity year" has ended, and you have had some time to finish the bookkeeping, hand both the bookkeeping and the receipts to the person whom the Club has designated as comptroller. Do not give them access to the money or bank account, because you are still responsible for the money.
- Expect the club members get the report from the comptroller. The Board will decide the annual general meeting (AGM), and if the comptroller finds that the Board has done their work well enough, then all is good. However, that's from the club's point of view. The Board can still be sued by others, such as the government if there is a tax fraud, etc.
- If you go on being Treasurer next year too, just go on with it. Otherwise, hand it over to the new Treasurer, who is supposed to check that everything totals up in the bank account and the cash, when they start the new "activity year".
Tips
- It can be very nice and fun to do voluntary work.
- The bookkeeping and any taxation duties are sometimes done annually by an external accountant, so sometimes the treasurer doesn't have this responsibility.
Warnings
- Note that you are responsible even if you don't get any pay for your work.In most cases that's no problem, or a very small problem, but some Board members have gotten into big problems in clubs with big costs, for example, sport clubs with employed sport stars, and the sports club earning too little to pay the employment taxes and fees.[citation needed] Then the Board members have been found responsible to pay these extra costs in some cases.[citation needed]
