As a board member or volunteer treasurer of your not for profit organisation, ensuring the accounting records are accurate and up to date is critical.  This task is not difficult to do especially with an accounting software system such as Admin Bandit, but there are a lot of details you need to pay attention to.

Over the next three posts we will look at some of the important issues around managing and maintaining your accounting records.

Here we go with part 1:
  • Ensure reconciliations are completed on a regular basis.  The bank reconciliation should be completed each month.  Review any unpresented cheques and if over 30 days, follow up to ascertain why they haven’t been banked.  There is nothing worse than when your bank balance is low and you then have a large unpresented cheque hit your account.
  • When doing the reconciliation, review the transactions on the bank statement to make sure they are correct as banks do make mistakes.  If payments have been made by electronic funds transfer or credit cards you need to verify they are correct.
  • Reconcile your debtors and creditors accounts and prepared a schedule.  For example and in relation to amounts owed to you, list outstanding debtors that are under 30 days as well as over 30, 60 and 90 days.  Any debtors over 30 days should be followed up and ideally try not let debtors get to 60 days.  The same with amounts you owe to other organisations, list outstanding creditors and try not to fall too far behind with making payments.  How you manage your debtors and creditors directly relates to your cash flow management so you need to monitor this very closely.
  • If you make instalment payments make sure the amounts are properly reconciled.  For example, you may pay insurance each month so ensure the Insurance account is reconciled each month and that the actual payment has been made.  This can also apply to other automatic or manual deductions you may have set up such as for loan repayments, leases and rent.

That will give you something to think about now so gather your Merry Men and make sure they understand these requirements, too.