Three Tips For New Volunteer Treasurers

Arrange a Handover

Schedule coffee with the outgoing treasurer to swap important documents and chat about your role. This includes:

1. Handing over the accounts, cheque books, receipt books, invoices/receipts for purchases, bank statements, budgets, reports and any other relevant documents.
2. If your organisation uses accounting software, get a tutorial on how to use it, including passwords. Of course, your tutorial will be short and sweet if you use Admin Bandit because our software is self-explanatory (sorry, couldn't resist a plug!).
3. Handing over a treasurer's or financial procedures manual, if your organisation has one. If not, you can create one when you're more familiar with your role - this will add value to your organisation and future treasurers will breathe a sigh of relief!
4. Discuss any unfinished business, such as due bills or income, and any spending commitments or expected income that isn't in the latest budget.
5. Ask questions! This is your chance to discuss any worries, have accounting concepts explained or get trouble-shooting advice. Grab the outgoing treasurer's contact details for future reference.

Change Bank Signatories

Your organisation probably has a rule that two or three committee members, including yourself as treasurer, must sign, and thus authorise, cheques and bank withdrawal slips. These are called "signatories" and, chances are, you won't be the only new one - other committee roles probably also changed hands when you were voted in at your annual general meeting. So you need to update your bank's records of who these people are, which is as simple as picking up a form from any branch and then filling it in. All new signatories will probably need to go to the bank and show 100 points of identification, unless they are existing customers.

While you're at the bank, make sure your bank statements are issued monthly and cover the entire month. It sounds strange, but some banks start statements from the date an account was opened, not the beginning of the month. Setting up your statements as we've suggested will make doing reconciliations so much easier.

Get Organised

Start as you plan to continue - getting organised now will give you a clear picture of what you're doing and set the tone for your tenure as treasurer. It will also save many hours of late night hair-tearing and rummaging through a mess of paperwork.

Hopefully your predecessor was just as diligent as you're going to be, which means you can leisurely go through the accounts, checking everything is filed correctly and familiarising yourself with what's required at the same time.

If not... well, hopefully you like filing because you've got a bit of work to do!

Nerida Gill is the developer of Admin Bandit Online, a multi-award winning web-based accounting software package designed specifically to meet the unique needs of volunteer treasurers in grass roots non-profit and community groups. http://www.adminbandit.com.au. Sign up for your free trial today at FreeTrial.