Questions for Treasurer's - Keeping Financial Records

[Andrew Bloxham]

One day I will cease being Treasurer of our Men's Shed and will have to hand it over to some other willing person! I ask myself - am I keeping the records in a sensible manner or could it be done better? Would they be easy to take on by someone else? Would they understand the idiosyncrasies of my setup? Questions How do you keep your shed's financial records - manual or electronically? If electronically do you use spreadsheets, a bespoke package, or something else. If spreadsheets - which program? Microsoft Excel or perhaps LibreOffice (which is free) If a bespoke package, which one - eg Quicken, Quick Books, Money Manager - or other? If a bespoke package did you already know how to use it or was it new to you? Would you recommend your package? I currently use Excel and have 3 sheets in the workbook -

Sheet 1 covers income and expenditure for all cash transactions (some 90% of all entries)

Sheet 2 is a mirror of sheet 1 and covers all bank transactions (not many)

Sheet 3 brings together the totals of sheets 1 and 2 for each 'category' of income & expenditure in an old-style traditional Balance Sheet format - automatically.

But it's big and clumsy, it's not easy to print out sheets 1 and 2, and I'm looking to simplify it, perhaps with a bespoke program. I've used Money Manager (by MoneySoft) for over 35 years so that is my first choice, but perhaps Quicken is the current well-known popular and supported program. I would welcome your thoughts. Andrew Bloxham Southbourne Men's Shed

Added 22/1/18 Since writing this post I have managed to simplify matters (for myself) in Excel. One worksheet for all cash and bank entries with a bit of automation for placing entries into the correct receipt/payment column, and with a second sheet to bring these together into an old style Balance Sheet.

1. Money Manager by Moneysoft - one off cost £54 - http://moneysoft.co.uk/money-manager-overview/

2. Quicken One off (?) £34.99 - http://jiosoft.co.uk/quicken-uk.php

3. QuickBooks - is a monthly subscription and doesn't seem to meet our needs - https://quickbooks.intuit.com/uk/

[Terry_Hoy]

Hi, I’m the treasurer for HAMESH men’s shed in Havant, I’ve been the only treasurer since May 2016.
I had always kept my home accounts on Microsoft Money until Windows 10 where it was no longer supported for a while, and in that time I moved on to AceMoney, a cheap alternative.

I use this software for the shed as a means of keeping track of all banking transactions; every transaction here will reconcile with the bank statement(s).

I also use Microsoft Excel (LibreOffice works fine) to record all financial transactions;
There are currently seven sheets set up to record the following.
• Annual subscriptions.
• Sponsorship / donations.
• Expenses, running cost, and replacement tools, etc.
• Purchases towards fundraising, penkits, varnish, and adhesives etc.
• Petty cash, I transfer money into a cashbox, used for tea & biscuits etc.
• Sales made for fundraising.
• Balance, this is where everything comes together on one sheet, and the final figure here should and does reconcile with the balance shown in AceMoney.

AceMoney does have reporting routines, but I prefer to use the data from the spreadsheet to make my financial reports.
 
I make regular backups of the data recorded, and keep a further backup on to a USB memory stick, that could be passed on to someone else to take over my role.

Terry Hoy